CU-MA-English-SEM-III-Literary Theory-Second draft

beyond man and humanism ....\" On the coming \"monstrosity,\" see also De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967), p. 14. This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 432 M. H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel metaphysics of presence that this view replaces) we are not able even to name. Derrida's vision is thus, as he puts it, of an \"as yet unnamable something which cannot announce itself except ... under the species of a non-species, under the formless form, mute, infant, and terrifying, of monstrosity.\"15 2 Hillis Miller sets up an apt distinction between two classes of current structuralist critics, the \"canny critics\" and the \"uncanny critics.\" The canny critics cling still to the possibility of \"a structuralist-inspired criticism as a rational and rationalizable activity, with agreed-upon rules of procedure, given facts, and measurable results.\" The uncanny critics have renounced such a nostalgia for impossible certainties.16 And as himself an uncanny critic, Miller's persistent enterprise is to get us to share, in each of the diverse works that he criticizes, its self-deconstructive revelation that in default of any possible origin, ground, presence, or end, it is an interminable free-play of indeterminable meanings. Like Derrida, Miller sets up as his given the written text, \"innocent black marks on a page\"\"17 which are endowed with traces, or vestiges of meaning; he then employs a variety of strategies that maximize the number and diversity of the possible meanings while minimizing any factors that might limit their free- play. It is worthwhile to note briefly two of those strategies. For one thing Miller applies the terms \"interpretation\" and \"meaning\" in an extremely capacious way, so as to conflate linguistic utterance or writing with any metaphysical representation of theory or of \"fact\" about the physical world. These diverse realms are treated equivalently as \"texts\" which are \"read\" or \"interpreted.\" He thus leaves no room for taking into account that language, unlike the physical world, is a cultural institution that developed expressly in order to mean something and to convey what is meant to members of a community who have learned how to use and interpret language. And within the realm of explicitly verbal texts, Miller allows for no distinction with regard to the kinds of norms that may obtain or may not obtain for the \"interpretation\" of the entire 15. Derrida, \"La Structure, le signe,\" p. 428. \"We possess no language ... which is alien to this history; we cannot express a single destructive proposition which will not already have slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulates of that very thing that it seeks to oppose.\" \"Each limited borrowing drags along with it all of metaphysics\" (pp. 412-13). 64 16. J. Hillis Miller, \"Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II,\" The Georgia Review 30 (Summer 1976): 335-36. 17. Miller, \"Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait,\" Daedalus 105 (Winter 1976): 107. This content downloaded from 151 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry Spring 1977 433 corpus of an individual author's writings, or of a single work in its totality, or of a particular passage, sentence, or word within that work. As a critical pluralist, I would agree that there is a diversity of sound (though not equally adequate) interpretations of the play King Lear, yet I claim to know precisely what Lear meant when he said, \"Pray you undo this button.\" A second strategy is related to Derrida's treatment of the \"trace.\" Like Derrida, Miller excludes by his elected premises any control or limitation of signification by reference to the uses of a word or phrase that are current at the time an author writes, or to an author's intention, or to the verbal or generic context in which a word occurs. Any word within a given text-or at least any \"key word,\" as he calls it, that he picks out for special scrutiny-can thus be claimed to signify any and all of the diverse things it has signified in the varied forms that the signifier has assumed through its recorded history; and not only in a particular language, such as English or French, but back through its etymology in Latin and Greek all the way to its postulated Indo-European root. Whenever and by whomever and in whatever context a printed word is used, therefore, the limits of what it can be said to mean in that use are set only by what the interpreter can find in historical and etymological dictionaries, supplemented by any further information that the interpreter's own erudition can provide. Hence Miller's persistent re-course to etymology- and even to the significance of the shapes of the printed letters in the altering form of a word-in expounding the texts to which he turns his critical attention.18 Endowed thus with the sedimented meanings accumulated over its total history, but stripped of any norms for selecting some of these and rejecting others, a key word-like the larger passage or total text of which the word is an element-becomes (in the phrase Miller cites from Mallarme) a suspense vibratoire,19 a vibratory suspension of equally likely meanings, and these are bound to include \"incompatible\" or \"irreconcilable\" or \"contradictory\" meanings. The conclusion from these views Miller formulates in a variety of ways: a key word, or a passage, or a text, since it is a ceaseless play of anomalous meanings, is \"indeterminable,\" \"undecipherable,\" \"unreadable,\" \"undecidable.\"20 Or more bluntly: \"All reading is misreading.\" \"Any reading can be shown to be a misreading on evidence drawn from the text itself.\" But in misreading a text, the interpreter is merely repeating what the text itself has done before him, 18. See, for example, his unfolding of the meanings of \"cure\" and \"absurd\" in \"Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure,\" I, The Georgia Review 30 (Spring 1976): 6-11. For his analysis of significance in the altering shapes, through history, of the printed form of a word see his exposition of abyme, ibid., p. 11; 65 also his exposition of the 152 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

letter x in \"Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line,\" Critical Inquiry 3 (Autumn 1976): 75-76. 19. \"Tradition and Difference,\" p. 12. 20. See, e.g., \"Stevens' Rock,\" I, pp. 9- 11; \"Walter Pater,\" p. 111. This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 434 M. H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel for \"any literary text, with more or less explicitness or clarity, already reads or misreads itself.\"21 To say that this concept of interpretation cuts the ground out from under the kind of history I undertook to write is to take a very parochial view of what is involved; for what it comes to is that no text, in part or whole, can mean anything in particular, and that we can never say just what anyone means by anything he writes. But if all interpretation is misinterpretation, and if all criticism (like all history) of texts can engage only with a critic's own misconstruction, why bother to carry on the activities of interpretation and criticism? Hillis Miller poses this question more than once. He presents his answers in terms of his favourite analogues for the interpretive activity, which he explores with an unflagging resourcefulness. These analogues figure the text we read as a Cretan labyrinth, and also as the texture of a spider's web; the two figures, he points out, have been fused in earlier conflations in the myth of Ariadne's thread, by which Theseus retraces the windings of the labyrinth, and of Arachne's thread, with which she spins her web.22 Here is one of Miller's answers to the question, why pursue the critical enterprise? Pater's writings, like those of other major authors in the Occidental tradition, are at once open to interpretation and ultimately indecipherable, unreadable. His texts lead the critic deeper and deeper into a labyrinth until he confronts a final aporia. This does not mean, however, that the reader must give up from the beginning the attempt to understand Pater. Only by going all the way into the labyrinth, following the thread of a given clue, can the critic reach the blind alley, vacant of any Minotaur, that impasse which is the end point of interpretation.23 Now, I make bold to claim that I understand Miller's passage, and that what it says, in part, is that the deconstructive critic's act of interpretation has a beginning and an end; that it begins as an intentional, goal-oriented quest; and that this quest is to end in an impasse. The reaching of the interpretive aporia or impasse precipitates what Miller calls \"the uncanny moment\"-the moment in which the critic, thinking to deconstruct the text, finds that he has simply participated in the ceaseless play of the text as a self-deconstructive artefact. Here is another of Miller's statements, in which he describes both his own and Derrida's procedure: Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful and circumspect entering of each textual labyrinth. . .. The deconstructive critic seeks to find, by this process of retracing, the ele- 21. \"Walter Pater,\" p. 98; \"Stevens' Rock, II,\" p. 333. 22. 153 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

\"Ariadne's Thread,\" p. 66. 23. \"Walter Pater,\" p. 112. This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to 66 JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry Spring 1977 435ment in the system studied which is a logical, the thread in the text in question which will unravel it all, or the loose stone which will pull down the whole building. The deconstruction, rather, annihilates the ground on which the building stands by showing that the text has already annihilated that ground, knowingly or unknowingly. Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.24 The uncanny moment in interpretation, as Miller phrases it elsewhere, is a sudden \"mise en abyme\" in which the bottom drops away and, in the endless regress of the self-baffling free-play of meanings in the very signs which both reveal an abyss and, by naming it, cover it over, we catch a glimpse of the abyss itself in a \"vertigo of the underlying nothingness.'\"25 The \"deconstructive critic,\" Miller has said, \"seeks to find\" the logical element in a text, the thread which, when pulled, will unravel the whole texture. Given the game Miller has set up, with its graphocentric premises and freedom of interpretive manoeuvre, the infallible rule of the deconstructive quest is, \"Seek and ye shall find.\" The deconstructive method works, because it can't help working; it is a can't-fail enterprise; there is no complex passage of verse or prose which could possibly serve as a counterinstance to test its validity or limits. And the uncanny critic, whatever the variousness and distinctiveness of the texts to which he applies his strategies, is bound to find that they all reduce to one thing and one thing only. In Miller's own words: each deconstructive reading, \"performed on any literary, philosophical, or critical text.reaches, in the particular way the given text allows it, the 'same' moment of an aporia. . .. The reading comes back again and again, with different texts, to the 'same' impasse.\"26 It is of no avail to point out that such criticism has nothing whatever to do with our common experience of the uniqueness, the rich variety, and the passionate human concerns in works of literature, philosophy, or criticism-these are matters which are among the linguistic illusions that the criticism dismantles. There are, I want to emphasize, rich re-wards in reading Miller, as in reading Derrida, which include a delight in his resourceful play of mind and language and the many and striking insights yielded by his wide reading and by his sharp eye for unsuspected congruities and differences in our heritage of literary and philosophical writings. But these rewards are yielded by the way, and that way is always to the ultimate experience of vertigo, the uncanny 24. \"Stevens' Rock, II,\" p. 341. See also \"Walter Pater,\" p. 101, and \"Ariadne's Thread,\" p. 74. 25. \"Stevens' Rock,\" I, pp. 11-12. The unnamable abyss which Miller glimpses has its parallel in the unnamable and terrifying monstrosity 154 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

which Derrida glimpses; see above, p. 432. 26. \"Deconstructing the Deconstructors,\" Diacritics 5 (Summer 1975): 30. This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 436 M. H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel 67 frisson at teetering with him on the brink of the abyss; and even the shock of this discovery is soon dulled by its expected and invariable recurrence. I shall cite a final passage to exemplify the deft and inventive play of Miller's rhetoric, punning, and figuration, which give his formulations of the mise en abyme a charm that is hard to resist. In it he imposes his fused analogues of labyrinth and web and abyss on the black-on-blanks which constitute the elemental given of the deconstructive premises: Far from providing a benign escape from the maze, Ariadne's thread makes the labyrinth, is the labyrinth. The interpretation or solving of the puzzles of the textual web only adds more filaments to the web. One can never escape from the labyrinth because the activity of escaping makes more labyrinth, the thread of a linear narrative or story. Criticism is the production of more thread to embroider the texture or textile already there. This thread is like a filament of ink which flows from the pen of the writer, keeping him in the web but suspending him also over the chasm, the blank page that thin line hides.27 To interpret: Hillis Miller, suspended by the labyrinthine lines of a textual web over the abyss that those black lines demarcate on the blank page, busies himself to unravel the web that keeps him from plunging into the blank-abyss, but finds he can do so only by an act of writing which spins a further web of lines, equally vulnerable to deconstruction, but only by another movement of the pen that will trace still another inky net over the ever-receding abyss. As Miller remarks, I suppose ruefully, at the end of the passage I quoted, \"In one version of Ariadne's story she is said to have hanged herself with her thread in despair after being abandoned by Theseus.\" 3 What is one to say in response to this abysmal vision of the textual world of literature, philosophy, and all the other achievements of man-kind in the medium of language? There is, I think, only one adequate response, and that is the one that William Blake made to the Angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. After they had groped their way down a \"winding cavern,\" the Angel revealed to Blake a ghastly vision of hell as an \"infinite Abyss\"; in it was \"the sun, black but shining,\" around which were \"fiery tracks on which revolved vast spiders.\" But no sooner, says Blake, had \"my friend the Angel\" departed, \"then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light, hearing a harper who sung to a harp.\" The Angel, \"sur- 27. \"Stevens' Rock, II,\" p. 337. This content downloaded from 147.226.161.143 on Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:23:47 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Critical Inquiry 155 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Spring 1977 437 prised asked me how I escaped? I answered: 'All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.' \" As a deconstructive Angel, Hillis Miller, I am happy to say, is not serious about deconstruction, in Hegel's sense of \"serious\"; that is, he does not entirely and consistently commit himself to the consequences of his premises. He is in fact, fortunately for us, a double agent who plays the game of language by two very different sets of rules. One of the games he plays is that of 68 a deconstructive critic of literary texts. The other is the game he will play in a minute or two when he steps out of his graphocentric premises onto this platform and begins to talk to us. I shall hazard a prediction as to what Miller will do then. He will have determinate things to say and will masterfully exploit the resources of language to express these things clearly and forcibly, addressing him-self to us in the confidence that we, to the degree that we have mastered the constitutive norms of this kind of discourse, will approximate what he means. He will show no inordinate theoretical difficulties about be-ginning his discourse or conducting it through its middle to an end. What he says will manifest, by immediate inference, a thinking subject or ego and a distinctive and continuant ethos, so that those of you who, like myself, know and admire his recent writings will be surprised and de-lighted by particularities of what he says, but will correctly anticipate both its general tenor and its highly distinctive style and manner of proceeding. What he says, furthermore, will manifest a feeling as well as thinking subject; and unless it possesses a superhuman forbearance, this subject will express some natural irritation that I, an old friend, should so obtusely have misinterpreted what he has said in print about his critical intentions. Before coming here, Miller worked his thoughts (which involved inner speech) into the form of writing. On this platform, he will proceed to convert this writing to speech; and it is safe to say-since our chair-man is himself a double agent, editor of a critical journal as well as organizer of this symposium-that soon his speech will be reconverted to writing and presented to the public. This substitution of &criture for parole will certainly make a difference, but not an absolute difference; what Miller says here, that is, will not jump an ontological gap to the printed page, shedding on the way all the features that made it intelligible as discourse. For each of his readers will be able to reconvert the black-on-blanks back into speech, which he will hear in his mind's ear; he will perceive the words not simply as marks nor as sounds, but as already invested with meaning; also, by immediate inference, he will be aware in his reading of an intelligent subject, very similar to the one we will infer while listening to him here, who organizes the well-formed and significant sentences and marshals the argument conveyed by the text. There is no linguistic or any other law we can appeal to that will prevent a deconstructive 156 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

critic from bringing his graphocentric procedures. M. H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel dures to bear on the printed version of Hillis Miller's discourse-or of mine, or of Wayne Booth's-and if he does, he will infallibly be able to translate the text into a vertiginous mise en abyme. But those of us who stubbornly refuse to substitute the rules of the deconstructive enterprise for our ordinary skill and tact at language will find that we are able to understand this text very well. In many ways, in fact, we will understand it better than while hearing it in the mode of oral discourse, for the institution of print will render the fleeting words of his speech by a durable graphic correlate which will enable us to take our own and not the speaker's time in attending to it, as well as to re-read it, to collocate, and to ponder until we are satisfied that we have approximated the author's meaning. After Hillis Miller and I have pondered in this way over the text of the other's discourse, we will probably, as experience in such matters indicates, continue essentially to disagree. By this I mean that neither of us is apt to find the other's reasons so compelling as to get him to change his own interpretive premises and aims. But in the process, each will have come to see more clearly what the other's reasons are for doing what he does, and no doubt come to discover that some of these reasons are indeed good reasons in that, however short of being compelling, they have a bearing on the issue in question. In brief, insofar as we set ourselves, in the old-fashioned way, to make out what the other means by what he says, I am confident that we shall come to a better mutual understanding. After all, without that confidence that we can use language to say what we mean and can interpret language so as to deter-mine what was meant, there is no rationale for the dialogue in which we are now engaged. 7.4.1 M.H. AbramsDefense of Pluralism: The essay begins with the review of J. Hillis Miller of Abrams’ which contains historical procedures. In his reply to Miller, Abrams defends pluralism-bringing together of diverse points of view on a subject, with diverse results. The approach is not only valid but also necessary to the understanding of literary and cultural history. In the study of literature and culture, only pluralism can help to achieve deep knowledge. According to Miller, the premises and procedures of traditional studies in the human sciences are at stake (in danger). 7.4.2 The premises of the Traditional Historians which Abrams Supports i) The basic materials of history are written texts. The authors of the text used the rules of their language to say something determinate. They assumed that their readers would be able to understand what they have said in their text. 157 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

ii) The historian, an as interpreter of the author’s statement tries to approximate the meanings intended by the author and aims to convey them to the readers. He puts his interpretation is sound it approximates what the author meant. iii) The historian presents his interpretation to the public in the expectation that the expert reader’s interpretation of a passage will approximate his own and thus confirm the “objectivity” of his interpretation. The author knows that some of his interpretations will be taken as mistakes. If there are many errors, his book will not be accepted as history but as historical fiction. 7.4.3 M.H. Abrams’ views on Linguistic Interpretation: According to Abrams, the differences among the organizing categories, topics and patterns used by the historians affect the diversity in the stories told by different historians. The pluralist theory accepts the fact. The historian’s faithfulness to the linguistic meanings reveals the soundness of the story. Miller on his review of Abrams’ book ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ says that for Abrams, ‘a literary text has a single meaning’. Miller wants to suggest that Abrams’ theory of language is mimetic and a straightforward ‘mirror’ of the reality it reflects. Abrams does not agree with the charge. He comments that it is wrong to say that all views of language which are not in the deconstructive mode are mimetic views. His views are functional and pragmatic. Language is used to achieve a 71-great diversity of human purposes. One of these purposes is to assert something about a state of affair. Such an assertion does not mirror and so it is not mimetic. It serves to direct attention to select aspects of that state of affairs. Abrams agrees that many passages quoted in Natural Supernaturalism have multiple meanings. He claims that whatever the author means is similar to the meaning taken by the reader and this is sufficient for the story he tells. The opinions of Abrams and Miller are different. Miller does not claim that Abrams is always wrong in his interpretation. But being a traditional historian, he can never be right in his interpretation. Miller agrees to Nietzsche’s claim that there is no correct interpretation as the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations. Nietzsche’s views of interpretation are relevant to the deconstructionist like Jacques Derrida. Miller accepts Nietzsche’s opinion ‘that reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning into a text which has no meaning ‘in it’. Interpretation helps us to get mastery over something. Miller and the deconstructionists agree to the view of the linguistic philosopher Lewis Carroll that meaning is imported into a text. For Abrams the trouble lies in the claim 158 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

that the conclusions of deconstructivists are infallibly right. He opposes the views of deconstructionists. 7.4.4 Linguistic Premises of Jacques Derrida: The first premise is his shift of study from spoken form of language to its written form. Like the French Structuralists, he shifts his inquiry from language to ecriture. Earlier speech or parole is given primary importance but Derrida gives more importance to writing (ecriture). The Second premise is that a written text consists of black marks which are separated by blanks, spaces and margins. The reader allows himself to be locked into them. To Derrida, it is a move from the “logo centric model” to his “graphocentric model”. The author is taken as an additional mark. Even the structural element of language, syntax, is not given any role in determining the 72 meanings of words; for according to graphocentric model, when we look at a page, we see no organization but only a ‘chain’ of grouped marks, a sequence of individual signs. The black marks on white paper are the sole things that are actually present in reading. The marks on the page are not marks but signs. The author is also considered by Derrida as one more mark among other marks. The marks on a page are not random markings, but they are sings. A sign has a dual aspect as signifier and signified, signal and concept, or mark with meaning. But these meanings (significations) consist not in a positive attribute, but in a negative (or relational) attribute - that is, its difference. Derrida used the portmanteau word “difference” which means both to be different and to defer. This difference puts into motion (brings out) the incessant (continuous) play of signification (meaning) that goes on within the seeming immobility of the marks on the printed page. In this way the absence of meaning extends its field. Derrida uses the term ‘trace’ to show what is distinctive in the signification. It is an elusive aspect of a text. It is not there but functions as if it were there. It appears and disappears and the reader has to go in search of it. In presenting itself it effaces itself. Derrida’s conclusion is that no sign or chain of signs can have a determinate meaning. 7.4.5 Linguistic Premises of J. Hillis Miller: Miller distinguishes between two classes of structuralist critics, the ‘canny critics’ and the ‘uncanny critics. The canny critics follow the possibility of ‘a structuralist inspired criticism as a rational and rationalizable activity, with agreed upon rules of procedures, given facts and measurable results. The uncanny critics support impossible uncertainties. Miller is himself an uncanny critic. In his interpretation, there is an indeterminable free-play of 159 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

indeterminable meanings. Secondly, Miller accepts Derrida’s view that a text is nothing but “innocent block marks on a page”. The marks possess traces. Miller suggests a number of ways of maximizing the number of the possible meanings of the marks. Two of these methods are worthy to be considered. A) Miller uses the terms ‘interpretation’ and ‘meaning’ in a very capacious way. b) The second method is related to Derrida’s treatment of ‘trace’. Like Derriada, he does not allow any control or limitations of signification. Words exclude meanings like a diamond irradiating rays of light. Words are picked-up from the text and contemplated in all the possibilities of meaning that they exhibit. They are claimed to signify “any and all the diverse things they have signified” in the entire course of their evolution (development) in the recorded history. For Miller ‘all reading is misreading’. A Key word-like the larger passage or total text-is a vibratory suspension of equally likely meanings. These are bound to include ‘incompatible’ or ‘irreconcilable’ or contradictory meanings. Such a word is called a suspense vibratoire. Miller concludes that such a key word is a ceaseless play of anomalous meanings; its meaning is ‘indeterminable’. ‘Undecidable’, ‘undecipherable’, ‘unreadable’. All reading is misreading and ‘Any reading can be shown to be a misreading on evidence drawn from the text itself; But in misreading a text, the interpreter is merely repeating what the text itself has done before him, because ‘any literary text, with more or less explicitness or clarity, already reads or misreads itself’. If this is true, why should one carry on the activity of interpretation or criticism? Miller provides the answer through his favourite analogies of a Cretan labyrinth and of a Spiders web. Miller asserts that the deconstructive critic’s act of interpretation has a beginning and an end. It begins as an intentional, goal-oriented quest and ends in an impasse. (a dead-lock) Miller finds that he has simply participated in the ceaseless play of the text as a self- deconstructive artifact. The deconstructive critic seeks to find a logical element in the text. The element would help him like a thread which unravels (opens) the texture. The deconstructive method works because it is a can’t fail enterprise. No complex passage can test its 74 validity. The uncanny critic is bound to find that they (the threads) all reduce to one thing. Miller asserts that each deconstructive reading reaches the same moment of an aporia. The reading comes again and again to the same impasse (i.e., aporia). Abrams comments that the type of criticism mentioned by Miller has nothing to do with the human concerns in literary and critical works. Miller’s criticism, for Abrams, is pleasant but abstract like an abyss i.e., a deep valley. 160 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

7.4.6 J. Hillis Miller: The Deconstructive Angel According to Abrams, Miller is happily, in double role-one being a deconstructive critic and the other (phonocentric) will commence as soon as he steps out of the podium. He will do all determinate and definite things and will exploit the resources of language to express the things clearly and forcefully. He will apparently have recourse to norms of thinking, his words will have reference to outer world, and he will be displaying normative behaviour. He will be a feeling and thinking subject, showing all the ordinary degrees of responses and emotional-rational-logical reactions. In short, His preaching will not be manifested in his practices-his black-on-blanks, marks-on-the blanks will be perceived as if vested with meanings, not showing a free-play of meanings, but concrete interpretable, referable and understandable meanings. In the essay Abrams is strongly 161 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

underlining the inseparability of signifier from the signified. The linguistic binaries cannot be isolated from the human context. Explanation of Concepts: 4.5 Some Important Concepts: 4.5.1 ecriture- a kind of writing that includes speech as well as thought characteristic of both. 4.5.2 Trace- The self-effacing and residual effect of all the non- present meanings whose differences are inserted in the production of the ‘meaning’ of whit is ‘present’-marks left by all ‘tracks’ left. 75 4.5.3 Difference - The term is used by Derrida to present the ever-elusive nature of language. The term echoes the idea of endless difference (a final meaning is constantly postponed) and also the idea of difference (the exact meaning is never possible because of subtle variations in meaning). The term means both to be different and to differ. 4.5.4 Aporia - in Greek means impassable path. It suggests the “gaps” or lacuna between what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean. It is central to Derrida’s theory of difference. 4.5.5 Langue and Parole - The terms are introduced by Ferdinand-de-Saussure. Langue is all the elements of a language plus the rules for their combination (grammar/syntax and so forth). Parole is the use which individuals make of the resources of language (individual utterance). Language is abstract and parole is concrete. \" 7.5 SUMMARY The Deconstructive Angel is \"both a lucid exposition of the deconstructionist theory of discourse, and a trenchant attack on it from the standpoint of traditional humanist scholarship. Abrams begins the Deconstructive Angel challenging Miller's review of Natural Supernaturalism. Deconstruction is a philosophical-critical approach to textual analysis that is most closely associated with the work of Jacques Derrida in philosophy and the Yale School (Paul DeMan, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman) in literary theory and criticism. Derrida draws the term deconstruction from his interpretation of Martin Heidegger as a way to translate two Heideggerian terms: Destruktion, which means not destruction but a destructuring that dismantles the structural layers in a system; and Abbau, which means to take apart an edifice in order to see how it is constituted or deconstituted. For Derrida, then, deconstruction, in the context of philosophy, refers to a way to think the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts while exposing what the history of these concepts has been able to obscure or exclude. By displaying those concepts that the philosophical tradition both authorizes and excludes, a deconstructive reading seeks to work within the 162 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

closed field of metaphysical discourse without at the same time confirming that field. Instead, it allows a text to dismantle itself by exposing the internal inconsistencies and implicit significations that lie concealed within the language of the text. One way to understand deconstruction is in terms of a critique of the binary, oppositional thinking that, for Derrida, is central to the history of philosophy. This is to say, each term in the Western philosophical/cultural lexicon is accompanied by its binary opposite: intelligible/sensible, truth/error, speech/writing, reality/appearance, mind/body, culture/nature, good/evil, male/female, and so on. These oppositions do not peacefully coexist, however: one side of each binary opposition has been privileged and the other side devalued. A hierarchy has been established within these oppositions, as the intelligible has come to be valued over the sensible, mind has come to be valued over body, and so on. The task of deconstruction is to dismantle or deconstruct these binary oppositions: to expose the foundational choices of the philosophical tradition and to bring into view what the tradition has repressed, excluded, or—to use the Derridean terminology—marginalized. As a critical practice, the deconstruction of these oppositions involves a double movement of overturning and displacement. The first phase initiates an overturning of the hierarchy that valorizes the term traditionally subordinated by the history of philosophy: for example, privileging writing over speech, signifier over signified, or the figurative over the literal. But this privileging is temporary and strategic, for in overturning a metaphysical hierarchy, deconstruction seeks to avoid reappropriating the same hierarchical structure; it is the hierarchical oppositional structure itself that underwrites the metaphysical tradition, and to remain within the binary logic of metaphysical thinking will only reestablish and affirm these oppositions. The second phase of deconstruction destabilizes the inversion by showing the arbitrary nature of the process of hierarchical valorization itself and displaces the hierarchy altogether by intervening with a new \"undecidable\" term—for example, difference, trace, pharmakon, supplement—that resists the formal structure imposed by the binary logic of philosophical opposition. Much of Derrida's early work involves elucidating the play of these undecidable: the play of difference, which both differs and defers; the play of the trace, which is both present and absent; the play of the pharmakon, which is both poison and cure; the play of the supplement, which is both surplus and lack. By displaying the choices by means of which the philosophical tradition constitutes itself as a tradition, Derridean deconstruction opens the possibility to think difference other than as opposition 163 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

and hierarchy. Within literary criticism, the deconstructive method is used to show that the meaning of a literary text is not fixed and stable. Instead, by exploring the dynamic tension within a text's language, literary deconstruction reveals the literary work to be not a determinate object with a single correct meaning but an expanding semantic field that is open to multiple, sometimes conflicting interpretations. 7.6KEYWORDS  MLA - Modern Language Association  Lexicon – the vocabulary of a person, language or branch of knowledge 7.7LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Compile a list of authors who wrote on deconstruction theory. __________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 7.8UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. When was M.H. Abrams born? 2. The Deconstructive Angel was presented at a session of the MLA in which year? 3. What is Deconstruction according to M.H. Abrams? 4. Which two Heideggerian terms does Derrida want to translate? 5. Hillis Miller sets up an apt distinction between two classes of current structuralist critics. Name them. Long Questions 1. What are the premises of the traditional humanism supported by Abrams? 164 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

2. What are the linguistic premises of J. Hillis Miller discussed in the essay? 3. Discuss the linguistic premises of Jacques Derrida as mentioned in ‘The Deconstructive Angel’. 4. Explain the concepts Canny Critic and Uncanny Critic B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Who has written “The Deconstructive Angel”. a. Edward Said b. M.H. Abrams c. Ferdinand dc Saussure d. F.R. Leavis 2. Where was M.H Abrams born? a. New York b. New Zealand c. New Jersey d. London 3. What is the full form of MLA? a. Modern Language Association b. Member of Legislative Assembly c. Modern Linguistic Association d. Modern Legacy Association 4. Each term in the Western philosophical/cultural lexicon is accompanied by its binary opposite. What is the opposite of intelligible? a. Sensible b. Comprehensible 165 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

c. Accessible d. Coherent 5. For Miller ‘all reading is ____________.’ a. Text b. Critic c. Language d. Misreading Answers 1-b; 2-c; 3-a; 4-a; 5-d 7.9 REFERENCES Reference’s book  Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow (1991): The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. (London: Penguin).  https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/624849/mod_resource/content/ 1/a840_1_michel_foucault.pdf Textbook references  Mamoria, C.B. (2002). Personnel Management. Mumbai: Himalaya Publishing House.  Dipak Kumar Bhattacharyya, Human Resource Management, Excel Books.  French, W.L. (1990), Human Resource Management, 4th ed., Houghton Miffin, Boston.  H.J. Bernardin, Human Resource Management, Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi, 2004. Website  http://www.slideshare.net/sreenath.s/evolution-of-hrm 166 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 www.articlesbase.com/training-articles/evolution-of-human-resource- management- 1294285.html  http://www.oppapers.com/subjects/different-kinds-of-approaches-to-hrm- page1.html 167 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 8: INTRODUCTION TO MARXISM Structure 8.0Learning Objectives 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Introduction to Marxist Criticism 8.3 Summary 8.4 Keywords 8.5 Learning Activity 8.6Unit End Questions 8.7 References 8.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Explain the Marxist Thought.  Evaluate Marxist Criticism  State and answer the format of the examination-oriented questions. 8.1 INTRODUCTION Karl Marx (1818-1883) was primarily a theorist and historian. Marxism was originally the work of Marx, with important contributions from his friend and collaborator Engels. Marx and Engels authored The Communist Manifesto (1848), a pamphlet outlining their theory of historical materialism and predicting the last word overthrow of capitalism by the economic proletariat. Engels edited the second and third volumes of Marx's analysis and critique of capitalism, Das Kapital, both published after Marx's death. After scientifically examining social organization (thereby creating a methodology for social science: political science), Marx perceived human history to have consisted of a series 168 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

of struggles between classes--between the oppressed and the oppressing. Whereas Freud saw “human attraction\" to be the motivating factor behind human endeavour and Nabokov seemed to feel artistic impulse was the real factor, Marx thought that \"historical materialism\" was the ultimate driving force, a notion involving the distribution of resources, gain, production, and such matters. The supposedly \"natural\" political evolution involved (and would in the future involve) \"feudalism\" leading to \"bourgeois capitalism\" leading to \"socialism\" and finally to \"utopian communism.\" In bourgeois capitalism, the privileged bourgeoisie rely on the proletariat--the labour force responsible for survival. Marx theorized that when profits are not reinvested in the workers but in creating more factories, the workers will grow poorer and poorer until no short-term patching is possible or successful. At a crisis point, revolt will lead to a restructuring of the system. In literary theory, a Marxist interpretation reads the text as an expression of class struggle. Literature isn't simply a matter of private expression or taste. It somehow relates to the social and political conditions of the time. 8.2 INTRODUCTION TO MARXIST CRITICISM Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had a superb knowledge of world art and truly loved literature, serious music and painting. In their youth, both Marx and Engels wrote poetry. In fact, Engels on just one occasion seriously contemplated becoming a poet. They were well acquainted not only with classical literature but also with the works of less prominent and even of little-known writers both among their contemporaries and people who lived and worked in additional distant times. They admired Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Dickens, Fielding, Goethe, Heine, Cervantes, Balzac, Dante, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov and mentioned many other less famous people that had also made their mark within the history of literature. They also displayed an excellent love for the favoured art, for the epics of varied nations and other sorts of folklore: songs, tales, fables and proverbs. Marxist aesthetics, just like the whole teaching of Marx and Engels, are subordinated to the struggle for the communist reorganization of society. When developing their theory of aesthetics, Marx and Engels naturally based themselves on the achievements of their predecessors. But the most aesthetic problems – and especially the matter of the connection between art and reality –were solved by them in a fundamentally new way, on the idea of materialistic dialectics. Idealist aesthetics considered art as a reproduction of the perfect, 169 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

standing over and above actual reality. The origin of any kind, its development, flowering and decay all remained incomprehensible to the art theoreticians and historians of the pre- Marxian period, in the maximum amount as they studied these in isolation from man’s social existence. Marx and Engels considered it impossible to know art and literature proceeding only from their internal laws of development. In their opinion, the essence, origin, development and social role of art could only be understood through an analysis of the social organization as an entire, within which the economic factor – the event of productive forces in complex interaction with production relations – plays the decisive role. Thus, art and literature, as defined by Marx and Engels, is one among the sorts of social consciousness and it, therefore, follows that the explanations for its changes should be sought within the social existence of men. Marx and Engels revealed the social nature of art and literature and its development within the course of history and showed that during a society with class antagonisms it had been influenced by class contradictions and by the politics and ideologies of particular classes. Marx and Engels gave a materialistic explanation of the origin of the aesthetic sense itself. They noted that man’s capabilities, his capacity for perceiving the planet, for comprehending its beauty and for creating works and stories appeared as a result of the long development of human society and were the merchandise of man’s labour. As early as in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx pointed to the role of labour within the development of man’s capacity to perceive and reproduce. This concept was later developed by Engels in his work Dialectics of Nature, during which he noted that efforts of toil “have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the photographs of a Raphael…” Thus, both Marx and Engels emphasise that man’s sense isn't an inborn, but a socially-acquired quality. The founders of Marxism extended their dialectical view of the character of human thought to the analysis of artistic creativity. In examining the event of art alongside that of the fabric world and therefore the history of society, they noted that the content and sorts of art weren't established once and for all, but they inevitably developed and altered consistent with definite laws alongside the event of the fabric world and human society. Each period has inherent aesthetic ideals and produces works of art like its particular character and unrepeatable under other conditions. The very fact that the extent of development of society and its social organization determine the content of artistic works and therefore the prevalence of any particular literary or artistic genre was seen by Marx because the main 170 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

reason that art in several periods never repeats itself and, in particular, that there was no possibility to make the mythology of heroic poetry almost like those of the traditional Greeks under the conditions of the nineteenth century. For Marx and Engels, any social formation constituted a posh and dynamic system of interacting elements, each influencing the opposite – a system during which the economic factor is that the determining one only within the end. They were in no way inclined to qualify art as a passive product of the financial system. On the contrary, they emphasized that the varied sorts of social consciousness – including art and literature – actively influence the social reality from which they emerge. Marx and Engels drew attention to the fact that social life and therefore the ideology of particular classes are reflected faraway from mechanistic manner. Artistic creativity is subordinate to the overall laws of social development but, being a special sort of consciousness, has its distinctive features and specific patterns. One of art’s distinctive features is its relative independence because it develops. The very fact that works of art and writings are connected historically with particular social structures doesn't mean that they lose their significance when these social structures disappear. Marx and Engels considered as another particular feature of art and literature, the very fact that its periods of upsurge don't automatically coincide with social progress in other fields, including that of fabric production. As far as capitalist society cares, this imbalance, consistent with Marx and Engels, must be considered as an expression of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction, the contradiction between the social nature of production and therefore the private sort of appropriation. From his analysis of the contradictions of capitalism, Marx draws a conclusion which is of extraordinary importance for aesthetics, namely that “capitalist production is hostile to certain branches of spiritual production, for instance, art and poetry.” In their works, Marx and Engels set forth a variety of profound ideas on the category, nature of art during a society of antagonisms. They showed that even great writers, who were able, often despite their own class positions, to offer a real and vivid picture of real-world, were, during a class society, pressured by the ideas and interests of the ruling classes and regularly made serious concessions to those in their works. The founders of Marxism emphasized that art was a crucial weapon within the ideological struggle between classes. It could reinforce even as it could undermine the facility of the exploiters, could serve to defend class oppression or, on the contrary, contribute to the education and development of the consciousness of the toiling 171 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

masses bringing them closer to victory over their oppressors. Marx and Engels, therefore, involved a transparent distinction to be made between progressive and reactionary phenomena in feudal and bourgeois culture and suggests the principle of the party approach to art – that it's evaluated from the position of the revolutionary class. Marx and Engels said that a link existed between art, literature and therefore the class war. They acknowledged that classes weren't static and unchangeable but that class inter- relationships changed within the course of history, the role of the classes within the lifetime of a society undergoing complex metamorphoses. Thus, within the period of struggle against feudalism, the bourgeoisie was ready to create considerable spiritual values, but having come to power as a result of the anti-feudal revolutions, it gradually began to reject the very weapon it had itself forged within the struggle against feudalism. The bourgeoisie accomplishes this separate its revolutionary past when a replacement force appears in the historical arena – the proletariat. Under these conditions, attempts by individual members of the bourgeois intelligentsia, especially cultural and artistic figures to realize a deeper understanding of reality, to travel beyond the framework of bourgeois relations and express their protest against these in some kind, inevitably lead them to conflicts with official bourgeois society and their departure from bourgeois positions. Marx and Engels apply their dialectical and materialist theory of data to the analysis of art and literature. In their opinion, art is one of the ways of reflecting reality and, at an equivalent time, of perceiving and apprehending it; it's also one of the strongest levers of influencing the spiritual development of humanity. This approach to art and literary forms the idea of the materialist understanding of its social importance and prominent role within the progress of society. When examining literature and art, Marx and Engels concentrated their attention on the matter of realism – the foremost accurate depiction of reality in an inventive work. They considered realism as a trend in literature and a way of art to be the supreme achievement of world art. Engels formulated what's generally recognized because of the classical definition of realism. “Realism to my mind,” he wrote, “implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances.” Realistic representations, Marx and Engels emphasized, is by no means a mere copy of reality, but how of penetrating into the very essence of a phenomenon, a way of artistic generalization that creates it possible to disclose the standard traits of a specific age. This is often what they valued within the work of the good realist 172 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

writers like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Balzac, Pushkin et al. Marx described English realists of the 19th century – Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes and Gaskell – as an excellent pleiad of novelists “whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the planet more political and social truths that are uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.” Engels developed an identical line of thought when analysing the works of the good French realist writer Balzac. He noted that Balzac gave the reader “a most wonderfully realistic history of French society….” Marx and Engels were highly critical of attempts to put literature above politics and of the idea of “art for art’s sake.” They insisted that the works of realist writers should reflect a progressive world outlook, be permeated with progressive ideas and affect truly topical problems. it had been during this sense that they welcomed tendentiousness in literature, interpreted as ideological and political partisanship. They were deeply convinced that progressive literature had to reflect truthfully the deep-lying vital processes of the day, to promulgate progressive ideas and to defend the interests of the progressive forces in society. Marx and Engels stripped away the romantic idealization of the centre Ages and, at an equivalent time, demonstrated the inconsistency of the abstract view held by the Enlighteners that this was merely an age of social and cultural regression. They acknowledged that the transition from slave-owning to feudal society was historically inevitable and showed that the establishment of the feudal mode of production was a breakthrough within the development of human society. Marx’s and Engels’ evaluation of the Renaissance as an age of “the general revolution”, “the greatest progressive revolution” explains the nice and cosy sympathy they felt for the “giants” of that age. They saw the good men of the Renaissance not even as outstanding scholars, artists, or poets, but, at an equivalent time, as great revolutionaries in world, science and culture. Marx and Engels considered Dante one among the good writers whose work announced the transition from the centre Ages to the Renaissance. They saw him as a poet and thinker of genius and, at an equivalent time, as an inflexible warrior whose poetic works were infused with devotion and were inseparable from his political ideals and aspirations. According to Wilhelm Liebknecht, Marx knew the Divine Comedy almost by memory and would often declaim whole sections of it aloud. Marx’s “Introduction” to capital actually ends with the good Florentine’s proud words: “Go your own way, and let people say what they're going to!” The author of capital placed Dante among his most beloved poets – Goethe, Aeschylus and Shakespeare. Engels called Dante an individual of “unequalled 173 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

classic perfection” and “a colossal figure.” Marx and Engels held the good Spanish writer Cervantes in high esteem too. Paul Lafargue noted that Marx set the author of Don Quixote, alongside Balzac, “above all other novelists.” Finally, their admiration for Shakespeare, one among their most beloved writers, is understood to all or any. Both considered his plays with their far-ranging depiction of the lifetime of his time and their immortal characters to be classical samples of realist drama. The most important comment by the founders of scientific communism about classicism, the literary movement of the 17th and 18th centuries were made by Marx during a letter to Lassalle on July 22, 1861. On the idea of a materialist understanding of the event of culture, Marx in his letter rejected the unhistorical concept classicism was the results of a misunderstanding of the laws of classical aesthetics, with their famous principle of the three unities. He acknowledged that, though the theoreticians of classicism had misunderstood Attic drama and Aristotle’s Poetics, this was no accident or a misunderstanding of history, but a historical inevitability. Classicist playwrights “misunderstood” Aristotle because the “misunderstood” Aristotle correspond exactly to their taste in art and their aesthetic requirements, formed by the precise social and cultural conditions of the time. Marx and Engels uncovered the social, class-historical basis of the ideas of the 18th century Enlightenment. They showed that the Enlightenment wasn't just a movement in social thought, but an ideological expression of the interests of the progressive bourgeoisie, which was rising to struggle against feudal absolutism on the eve of the good French Revolution. They wrote about the leading men of the Enlightenment in Germany – Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland. Marx’s and Engels’ analysis of West European romanticism is of great importance to the elaboration of a genuinely scientific history of literature. Considering romanticism, a mirrored image of the age beginning after the good French Revolution, of all its inherent social contradictions, they distinguished between revolutionary romanticism, which rejected capitalism and was striving towards the longer term and romantic criticism of capitalism from the purpose of view of the past. They also differentiated between the romantic writers who idealized the pre–bourgeois social organization. They valued those whose works concealed democratic and important elements under a veneer of reactionary utopias and naive petty-bourgeois ideas and criticized the reactionary romantics whose sympathies for the past amounted to a defence of the interests of the nobility. Marx and Engels were especially keen on the works of such revolutionary romantics as Byron and Shelley. Marx and Engels considered realist traditions to be the culmination of the entire previous 174 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

literary process. The characteristic of Marx and Engels was their profoundly internationalist approach to literature and art. They paid equal attention to the art of all nations, European and non–European, large and little, believing that each people make their own unique contribution to the treasure-house of world art and literature. Their interests included the event of art and literature in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia also because of the artistic and cultural treasures of the East or of such small countries as Ireland, Iceland and Norway. They had a special attitude towards the democratic and revolutionary poets and writers who were on the brink of the proletariat. Throughout their lives, they strove to draw the simplest progressive writers of their time to the side of the socialist movement and to teach and temper them, while helping to beat the weaker aspects of their work. They actively contributed to the formation of a proletarian revolutionary trend in literature. Marx and Engels strove to foster a replacement sort of writer and artist who, assimilating the best traditions of classical literature would take a lively, creative part within the proletariat’s struggle for emancipation, proceeding from a broad understanding of the experiences and therefore the tasks of revolutionary struggle. The founders of Marxism saw the contradictions within the development of art under capitalism as a manifestation of the antagonistic nature of bourgeois society as an entire and thought of the answer of those problems to be possible only after the proletarian revolution and therefore the social reorganization of society. They showed brilliant foresight in anticipating the essential traits of the new communist society. Communism is in particular true freedom for the all-round and harmonious development of the individual. “The realm of freedom”, said Marx, “actually begins only where labour which is decided by necessity and mundane consideration ceases....” Labour free of exploitation becomes, under socialism the source of all spiritual and aesthetic creativity. Marx and Engels mean that with only given true economic, political and spiritual freedom can man’s creative powers develop to the complete which only proletarian revolution offers unbounded opportunities of endless progress within the development of literature. The good historical mission of the proletariat consists of the communist rebuilding of the planet. It had been within the proletariat that Marx and Engels saw the social force which could change the planet and supply for further progress not only in economics and politics but also in culture, the force which might cause the conditions required for the complete realization of mankind’s higher moral and aesthetic values. 175 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

8.3 SUMMARY  In this lesson, we have discussed the Marxist view of art and literature. We havelearnthowMarxandEngelshaveappliedtheirdialecticalandmaterialisttheoryofkno wledgetoanalysis.  A Marxist interpretation reads the text as an expression of up-to-date class war. Literature isn't simply a matter of private expression or taste. It somehow relates to the social and political conditions of the time.  Literature, for Marx, belongs to the superstructure (along with law, theology, politics, etc.). The challenge, then, is to see how it is influenced by the economic base. 8.4 KEYWORDS  PROLETARIAT : working-class people regarded collectively (often used with reference to Marxism).  Feudalism:the dominant social system in medieval Europe, in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.  Bourgeoisie:the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes 8.5 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Do a detailed research on works of realistic writers. __________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 8.6UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions 176 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Short Questions 1. Which is a level in the peace-making pyramid? 2. What is the working class in Marxist theory? 3. What considers justice, law, fairness, responsibility, and authority not to be absolute, but to be mediated by personal contexts? 4. Who was the first scholar to link Marxism and crime? 5. Who are bourgeoisie? Long Questions 1. What do Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels mean by the term “class struggle”? 2. What is Marxist Criticism? 3. What are the main tenets or features of Marxism? How it is related to literature? 4. Literature is an important part of the Marxist superstructure. Explain how? 5. How would you analyse a literary test using Marxism? B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. In Marxist theory, _____ is the belief that the arrangement of the bourgeoisie owning the means of production and the proletariat working for the interests of the bourgeoisie is legitimate. a. false consciousness b. left realism c. postmodern criminology d. false realism 2. _____ focuses on how racial issues have determined the quality of justice that has been available to people of colour in North America. a. Left realism b. Critical race theory c. Feminist criminology d. Racial criminology 177 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

3. _____ begin to engage in antisocial behaviour at an early age and continue to commit acts that harm others throughout their lives. a. Adolescent-limited offenders b. Life-course persistent offenders c. Juvenile delinquents d. Serial killers 4. Radical theories are also called _____. a. conflict b. Marxist c. critical d. All of these 5. Left realism contends that the idealism of _____ criminology sacrifices the interests of impoverished people for the interests of lower-class offenders. a. Marxist b. integrated c. feminist d. peace-making Answer 1-a,2-b,3-b,4-d,5-a 8.7 REFERENCES Reference’s book  Abrams, M.H. \"Marxist Criticism.\" A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. 147-153.  Biddle, Arthur W., and Toby Fulwiler. Reading, Writing, and the Study of Literature. NY: Random House, 1989. 178 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Lynn, Steven. Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory. 2nd ed. NY: Longman, 1998. Textbook references  Mamoria, C.B. (2002). Personnel Management. Mumbai: Himalaya Publishing House.  Dipak Kumar Bhattacharyya, Human Resource Management, Excel Books.  French, W.L. (1990), Human Resource Management, 4th ed., Houghton Miffin, Boston.  H.J. Bernardin, Human Resource Management, Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi, 2004. Website  http://www.slideshare.net/sreenath.s/evolution-of-hrm  www.articlesbase.com/training-articles/evolution-of-human-resource- management- 1294285.html  http://www.oppapers.com/subjects/different-kinds-of-approaches-to-hrm- page1.html 179 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT-9:RAYMOND WILLIAMS: “BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE” AND “DOMINANT, RESIDUAL AND EMERGENT” Structure 180 9.0 Learning Objective 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Life 9.3 Second World War 9.4 Adult Education 9.5 Cambridge University 9.6 Last Years 9.7 Legacy 9.8 Williams’ Publications 9.9 Raymond Williams, base & superstructure in Marxist cultural theory 9.10 Dominant, Residual and Emergent 9.11 Summary 9.12 Keywords 9.13 Learning activity 9.14Unit End Questions 9.15 References 9.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you should be able to:  Identify Raymond Williams CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 describe Raymond Williams’ life, education, his works  Identify the Base and Structures concepts  Describe about Dominant, Residual and Emergent 9.1 INTRODUCTION Raymond Henry Williamswas a Welsh novelist, academicand critic. He was born on August 31, 1921 and died on January 26, 1988. He was a prominent figure on the New Left and in the wider culture. His writings on politics, literature, culture and mass media contribute significantly to the Marxist criticism of culture and the arts. His books have sold over 750,000 copies in the United Kingdom alone (Politics and Letters, 1979), and there are several translations available. His works placed foundation of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Cultural materialism originated as a theoretical movement in literary theory and cultural studies in the early 1980s, along with new historicism, an American approach to early modern literature, with which it shares much ground. Williams coined the word to describe a theoretical fusion of leftist culturalism and Marxist analysis. Cultural materialists’ study historical records in order to reconstruct the zeitgeist of a particular historical period. 181 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Cultural materialism also describes what Williams called \"residual,\" \"emergent\" and \"oppositional\" cultural components, as culture is perceived as a \"productive process,\" that is, as part of the means of production. Cultural materialists, following in the footsteps of Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, and others, cultural materialists expand conventional Marxism's class-based analysis by focusing on the marginalized. Cultural materialists study how hegemonic powers in culture appropriate canonical and historically significant texts, such as Shakespeare and Austen, and use them to justify or enshrine those values in the cultural imaginary. 9.2 EARLY LIFE Williams was born in the Welsh village of LlanfihangelCrucorney, near Abergavenny, the son of a railway worker in a village where the railway men all voted Labour, while the local small farmers mostly voted Liberal. He mentioned it as 'Anglicised in the 1840s,' and it was not a Welsh-speaking town (Politics and Letters, 1979). However, there was a clear Welsh identity. In Abergavenny, he attended King Henry VIII Grammar School. The rise of Nazism and the threat of war dominated his adolescent years. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he was 14 years old and was acutely aware of what was going on due to his membership in the local Left Book Club. He also discusses the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, which was first published by the Left Book Club in the United Kingdom (Politics and Letters). He was a League of Nations member at the time, having attended a League-organized youth conference in Geneva. His group stopped in Paris on the way back, and he visited the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition.He purchased a copy of The Communist Manifesto and read for the first time Marx's writings there. 9.3 SECOND WORLD WAR PERIOD He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, but his studies were discontinued due to his military service. While at Cambridge, he entered the British Communist Party. He got task of writing a Communist Party pamphlet about the Russo-Finnish War with Eric Hobsbawm. William writes in (Politics and Letters) \"We were given the job as people who could write quickly, from historical materials supplied for us,\". As a professional with words, you were 182 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

frequently in there writing about subjects you didn't know anything about.\" At the time, the British government was willing to assist Finland in its fight against the Soviet Union, while still at war with Nazi Germany. He made the decision to join the British Army in the winter of 1940. While he remained at Cambridge to take his exams in June 1941, the same month that Germany invaded Russia, this was against the Party line at the time. As he mentions it, his membership lapsed, without him ever officially resigning. It was standard practise for undergraduates to be assigned to the signal corps when he entered the army. He was given some basic training before being assigned to artillery and anti-tank guns. He was considered 'officer stuff' and served as an officer in the Guards Armoured Division's Anti-Tank Regiment from 1941 to 1945. Following D Day, he was assigned to the early combat in Normandy.\"I don't think the complex chaos of that Normandy battle has ever been registered,\" he wrote in Politics and Letters. He commanded a unit of four tanks and mentions losing contact with two of them while battling SS Panzer forces; he never found out what happened to them since the unit was withdrawn at the time. He was active in the war from Normandy in 1944 through Holland and Belgium to Germany in 1945, where he was involved in the liberation of one of the smaller concentration camps that was later used to detain SS officers. He was also surprised to hear that the RAF had bombed Hamburg in its entirety, rather than only military targets and ports, as they had been told. 9.4EDUCATION He completed his M.A. from Trinity College in 1946 and went on to work as an adult education teacher at the University of Oxford for many years. He was recalled as a reservist to the Army in 1951 to serve in the Korean War. He declined to go and became a conscientious objector as a result. Culture and Society, published in 1958 and an instant success, cemented his popularity. In 1961, The Long Revolution was published. The New Left adopted Williams' writings, which attracted a huge audience. He was also well-known for his frequent contributions to the Manchester Guardian newspaper as a book reviewer. Williams' years of adult education were formative, and he was still a bit of an outsider at Cambridge University. He started his 183 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

essay, when asked to contribute to a book called My Cambridge, by saying that \"it was never my Cambridge. That was clear from the very beginning.\" 9.5 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY INTERVAL Williams was welcomed back to Cambridge in 1961 on the strength of his plays, eventually becoming Professor of Drama there (1974-1983). In 1973, he was a Visiting Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, an experience he drew on to write Television: Technology and Cultural Form, which is still relevant today (1974). He was a committed socialist who was fascinated by the connections between language, literature, and culture, and he wrote numerous books, essays, and articles on these and other issues. The Country and the City (1973), for example, alternates chapters about literature with chapters about social history.His deeply written Marxism and Literature (1977) is mostly aimed at specialists, but it also lays out his own cultural studies approach, which he named cultural materialism. This book was partly a reaction to \"structuralism\" in literary studies, and it pushed Williams to make a more theoretical argument of his own in response to criticisms that it was humanist Marxism based on untested assumptions about lived experience. Despite the fact that Williams drew heavily on Antonio Gramsci's thoughts, the book is clearly Williams's and written in his distinctive voice. For a more accessible version, see Culture (1981/1982), which also expands on some of the key points, especially about aesthetics. Debate Some readers might be surprised by Williams' views on other authors' contributions to culture and society. In his short book about George Orwell, for example, he is harshly critical of a figure with whom many people think he shares a lot of interests. Marshall McLuhan's writings on technology and culture were also criticised by Williams. This is the context for the chapter \"The Technology and the Society\" in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974). His book on Modern Tragedy can be read as an answer to the conservative literary critic George Steiner's The Death of Tragedy. Later, Williams became interested in Pierre Bourdieu's work, though he felt the latter was too pessimistic about the possibilities for social change. 184 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

9.6 LAST YEARS He got retired from Cambridge in 1983 and lived the rest of his life in Saffron Walden. He wrote Loyalties, a novel about a fictional group of upper-class revolutionaries drawn to Communism in the 1930s, when he was there. People of the Black Mountains, an experimental historical novel about people who lived or may have lived around the Black Mountains, the part of Wales from which he hails, was also in the works. It is told in a series of flashbacks, with a modern-day man searching for his grandfather who has not returned from a hill-walk. He brings to mind of the area as it was and might have been. The story starts in the Old Stone Age and progresses to the present day, still concentrating on ordinary people. When Raymond Williams died in 1988, he had taken it all the way back to the Middle Ages. Joy Williams, his wife, wrote it for publication. It was published in two volumes, with a Postscript that describes the remaining work. Almost all of the stories were written in typescript, and the author revised them many times.Only the Comet was left unfinished, and a few minor additions were needed to complete the plot. 9.7 LEGACY Williams was a founding member of the Cultural Materialist movement. Cultural materialism is one of a group of literary and cultural studies approaches that has hindered contemporary literary theory. Cultural materialism aims to draw attention to the methods used by power institutions to disseminate ideology, such as the church, the state, and the academy. It discusses the text's historical context and political ramifications, noting the dominant hegemonic status and the possibilities for its rejection and/or subversion through close textual study.Cultural materialism, according to British critic Graham Holderness, is a \"politicised type of historiography.\" Cultural materialists have considered Renaissance studies to be especially open to this kind of study, and they share some links with New Historicism in this regard. In the 1980s, Williams made significant connections with feminist, peace, and ecology movements, broadening his position beyond what might be called Marxism. He came to the conclusion that since there are so many different societies in the world, there would be many 185 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

different socialisms. His approach influenced the field of literary studies in the late twentieth century, especially in the United Kingdom. 9.8 WILLIAMS’ PUBLICATIONS Novels  Border Country, London, Chatto and Windus, 1960. reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.  Second Generation, London, Chatto and Windus, 1964. reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.  The Volunteers, London, Eyre-Methuen, 1978. Paperback edition, London, Hogarth Press, 1985  The Fight for Manod, London, Chatto and Windus, 1979. reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.  Loyalties, London, Chatto and Windus, 1985  People of the Black Mountains, Volume 1: The Beginning, London, Chatto and Windus, 1989  People of the Black Mountains, Volume 2: The Eggs of the Eagle, London, Chatto and Windus, 1990 Literary and cultural studies  Reading and Criticism, Man and Society Series, London, Frederick Muller, 1950.  Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, London, Chatto and Windus, 1952. Revised edition, London, Chatto and Windus, 1968.  Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, Preface to Film, London, Film Drama, 1954.  Culture and Society, London, Chatto and Windus, 1958. New edition with a new introduction, New York, Columbia University Press, 1963. Translated into Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and German.  The Long Revolution, London, Chatto and Windus, 1961. Reissued with additional footnotes, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965.  Communications, Britain in the Sixties Series, Harmondsworth, Penguin Special, Baltimore, Penguin, 1962: revised edition, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966. Third edition, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976. Translated into Danish and Spanish. 186 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Modern Tragedy, London, Chatto and Windus, 1966. New edition, without play Koba and with new Afterword, London, Verso, 1979.  S. Hall, R. Williams and E. P. Thompson (eds.) New Left May Day Manifesto. London, May Day Manifesto Committee, 1967. R. Williams (ed.) May Day Manifesto, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968, 2nd edition.  Drama in Performance (book by Raymond Williams), revised edition. New Thinkers Library, C. A. Watts, 1954  Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, London, Chatto and Windus, 1968. Reprinted, London, Hogarth Press, 1987.  The Pelican Book of English Prose, Volume 2: From 1780 to the Present Day, R. Williams, (ed.) Harmondsworth and Baltimore, Penguin, 1969  The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence, London Chatto and Windus, 1970. Reprinted, London, Hogarth Press, 1985  Orwell, Fontana Modern Masters Series, Glasgow, Collins, 1971. 2nd edition. Glasgow, Collins, Flamingo Paperback Editions, Glasgow, Collins, 1984.  The Country and the City, London, Chatto and Windus, 1973. Reprinted, London, Hogarth Press, 1985. Translated into Spanish.  J. Williams and R. Williams (eds.) D H Lawrence on Education, Harmondsworth, Penguin Education, 1973.  R. Williams (ed.) George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth Century Views, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1974.  Television: Technology and Cultural form, Technosphere Series, London, Collins, 1974. (ISBN 978-0415314565) Translated into Chinese (Taiwan's complex characters), Italian, Korean and Swedish.  Keywords, Fontana Communications Series, London, Collins, 1976. New edition, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984.  M. Axton and R. Williams (eds.) English Drama: Forms and Developments, Essays in honor of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, with an introduction by R. Williams, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1977.  Marxism and Literature, Marxist Introductions Series, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. Translated into Spanish, Italian and Korean.  Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London, New Left Books, 1979, Verso paperback edition, 1981. 187 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, London, Verso, 1980. New York, Schocken, 1981. Reissued as Culture and Materialism, Verso Radical Thinkers Series, 2005.  Culture, Fontana New Sociology Series, Glasgow, Collins, 1981. US edition, The Sociology of Culture, New York, Schocken, 1982.  R. and E. Williams (eds.) Contact: Human Communication and its History, London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1981.  Cobbett, Past Masters series, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1983.  Towards 2000, London, Chatto and Windus, 1983. US edition, The Sociology of Culture, with a Preface to the American edition, New York, Pantheon, 1984.  Writing in Society , London, Verso, 1983. US edition. New York, Verso, 1984  M. Williams and R. Williams (eds.) John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose, Methuen English Texts, London and New York, Methuen, 1986.  Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings, Preface by R. Williams, A. O'Connor, (ed.) London, Routledge, 1989.  Resources of Hope, R. Gable (ed.) London and New York, Verso, 1989.  What I Came to Say, London, Hutchinson-Radius, 1989.  The Politics of Modernism, T. Pinkney (ed.) London and New York, Verso, 1989.  The Raymond Williams Reader, J. Higgins (ed.) Oxford, Blackwell, 2001. Short stories  Red Earth, Cambridge Front, no. 2 (1941)  Sack Labourer, in English Short Story 1, W. Wyatt (ed.) London, Collins, 1941  Sugar, in R. Williams, M. Orrom, and M.J. Craig (eds.) Outlook: a Selection of Cambridge Writings, Cambridge, 1941, pp.7-14.  This Time, in New Writing and Daylight, no. 2, 1942-1943, J. Lehmann (ed.) London, Collins, 1943, pp. 158-164.  A Fine Room to be Ill In, in English Story 8, W. Wyatt (ed.) London, 1948. Drama  Koba (1966) in Modern Tragedy, London, Chatto and Windus  A Letter from the Country, BBC Television, April 1966, Stand, 12 (1971), pp. 17-34  Public Enquiry, BBC Television, March 15, 1967, Stand, 9 (1967), pp. 15-53 188 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Introductions  A seven-page introduction to All Things Betray Thee, a novel by Gwyn Thomas. 9.9 RAYMOND WILLIAMS’ BASE & SUPERSTRUCTURE IN MARXIST CULTURAL THEORY Raymond Williams’ assertion that culture is ‘a whole way of life’ formed the basis of his 1958 work Culture and Society. This was a book that was received by his peers as polemical and as a manifesto for the New Left. It was very much a product of the time, written in response to a burgeoning conservative reactionary stance against the extension of education to all children. His primary motivation for writing Culture and Society was consequently refuting ‘the increasing contemporary use of the concept of culture against democracy, socialism, the working class or popular education.’ In other words the current interpretation of culture was being used as a means of perpetuating and shoring up social inequality. This opinion, as it will be made clear, is evident in Williams’ attempt to democratise the meaning of culture and the political climate in which he was writing is an important contextual consideration. In the following analysis first the phrase ‘a whole way of life’ will be deconstructed and its meaning explained. Proceeding this the merits and limitations of his perspective will be discussed. Williams’ understands ‘culture’ as being made of two separate components; the first denotes a whole way of life, the second refers to the arts and learning. The former component represents the known meanings and directions which its members recognise and respond to, the latter represents new observations and meanings which are put forward and tested. These components are reflected in every human society and render culture ordinary. This interpretation challenges the widely held notion that culture means the high arts – theatre, literature, painting – that it is exclusive and access to it is restricted, predominantly through education, and is diametrically opposed to business, urban growth and individualism. For Williams the idea that possession of culture rested on the narrow assumption outlined above was absurd. This definition placed culture firmly within the realm of the bourgeois and out of the reach of the working classes. Instead, whilst recognising the contribution the bourgeoisie have made to English culture, Williams argues that the working classes have their own institutions, common meanings, arts and learning 189 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

and therefore participate in culture. Consuming and engaging with culture arises through the very prosaic prerequisite of living; it is the ‘product of a man’s whole committed personal and social experience.’ In The Long Revolution (1961) which followed on from Culture and Society Williams’ view on culture became distinctly relational in the sense that he champions the breaking down of a cultural hierarchy which separates literature and art from the everyday. This position is the logical outcome of an argument which sees all facets of life feeding into the conventions and institutions which inform the meanings that are shared by the community. Throughout Williams’ career he was interested in the processes of cultural development and he devised a theory of cultural materialism. The concept of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ should be seen as the first step taken by Williams in the construction of this dialectical understanding of culture. The overriding merit of Williams’ conceptualisation of culture is its inclusivity. The recognition of the cultural worth of all human activity is socially equalising. Its destruction of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture shuns the conservative view that mass participation in culture somehow devalues it and instead opens the way for its democratisation. This is decidedly progressive and his particular commitment to the democratisation of education has been inaugurated and accepted. On the other hand one of the most poignant criticisms levied at Williams’ ‘a whole way of life’ premise is that it is politically charged and that as a Marxist he has a vested interested in attributing, say, the formation of a trade union with the same cultural value as Dickens’ Bleak House or Millais’ Orphelia. He has been criticised for assuming that all people are capable of achieving an intellectual engagement with the world around them that has the capacity to inform cultural progression. [9] Whilst this critique is somewhat condescending of the working classes’ cognitive prowess, it should be remembered that when Williams’ work was first published, growing tension between the West and the Soviet Union increased hostility towards opinions that displayed socialist optimism. Williams’ view, as illustrated by the history of culture put forward in Culture and Society, is rooted in the analysis of past cultural change. He uses these observations to build a theory of progress, not only within this text, but also in his eventual propagation of cultural materialism. As with the historical materialism of Marx, such a view gives systems of 190 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

production a central waiting and is consequently dialectical, idealist and more often than not proven wrong by actual events. To conclude, the concept that culture is ‘a whole way of life’ challenged the compartmentalisation of culture into ‘high’ and ‘low’ and instead sought to create an understanding of the word which embraced the full range of human activity. Throughout his work Williams displayed a clear agenda. He sought, in San Juan words, ‘the democratisation of culture through mass participation in political decisions and the broadest access to education and the resources of communication.’At the most basic level of this call for what was barely short of a revolution was the premise that culture was ‘a whole way of life.’ This left a bad taste in the mouths of many of Williams’ conservative and centrist contemporaries. Notwithstanding the hard to deny political overtones of his work Williams’ groundbreaking cultural critiques have merit enough to cement his position as the father of Cultural Studies. Karl Marx, one of sociology's pioneers, introduced two related theoretical concepts called the base and superstructure. The production force, or materials and resources, that produce the goods that society needs are referred to as the base (substructure). The other aspects of society are referred to as superstructure. Superstructure consists of culture, institutions, political power structures, roles, rituals, and state. Raymond Williams’ conveys Williams takes great pains to define the notion of \"determination\" Now there is clearly a difference between a process of setting limits and exerting pressures, whether by some external force or by the internal laws of particular development, and that other process in which a subsequent content is essentially prefigured, predicted and controlled by a pre-existing external force.\". Why is \"determinism\" an issue when we are analysing popular culture? Base (primary economic activities) & Superstructure (a unitary \"area\" within which all cultural and ideological activities could be placed) are key terms in Marxist theory. What do these terms mean? Why might they be relevant to a study of popular culture? Williams insists that the relation between economic forces (base) and cultural activities is a complex one. He suggests that understandings which focus on how culture \"reproduces\" or \"reflects\" the economic base are not adequate to the complexities of how culture works. He 191 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

suggests that the idea of \"mediation\" is more useful. Look up \"mediation\" in your dictionary. What does it mean? Can we generalize from its basic meaning to see why this might be a more sophisticated explanation of how culture works? Williams insists that the metaphor of \"the base\" as static and fixed is not adequate to the \"more active, more complicated and more contradictory\" understanding of social forces as \"a process and not a state.\" Why is it important to think about the relation between economic forces and culture as a process? The concept of \"hegemony\" provides Williams with a way to think about why society is difficult to change. He notes that the Italian writer Gramsci offers hegemony as a term which \"supposes the existence of something which...is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway\". Common sense ideas which you could define as \"hegemonic\" include the idea of women as \"naturally\" maternal and the notion of men as \"naturally\" violent. Can you think of other social concepts which we accept as \"common sense\" while leaving unexamined how they came to be considered as the rule? Hegemony \"is the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived. That is why hegemony is not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of woman. Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure. From a strictly theoretical point of view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to begin. It would be in many ways preferable if we could begin from a proposition which originally was equally central, equally authentic: namely the proposition that social being determines consciousness. It is not that the two propositions necessarily deny each other or are in contradiction. But the proposition of base and superstructure, with its figurative element, with its suggestion of a definite and fixed spatial relationship, constitutes, at least in certain hands, a very specialized and at times unacceptable version of the other proposition. Yet in the transition from Marx to Marxism, and in the development of mainstream Marxism itself, the proposition of the determining base and the determined superstructure has been commonly held to be the key to Marxist cultural analysis. 192 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Now it is important, as we try to analyse this proposition, to be aware that the term of relationship which is involved, that is to say ‘determines’, is of great linguistic and real complexity. The language of determination and even more of determinism was inherited from idealist and especially theological accounts of the world and man. It is significant that it is in one of his familiar inversions, his contradictions of received propositions, that Marx uses the word ‘determines’. He is opposing an ideology that had been insistent on the power of certain forces outside man, or, in its secular version, on an abstract determining consciousness. Marx’s own proposition explicitly denies this, and puts the origin of determination in men’s own activities. Nevertheless, the particular history and continuity of the term serves to remind us that there are, within ordinary use—and this is true of most of the major European languages—quite different possible meanings and implications of the word ‘determine’. There is, on the one hand, from its theological inheritance, the notion of an external cause which totally predicts or prefigures, indeed totally controls a subsequent activity. But there is also, from the experience of social practice, a notion of determination as setting limits, exerting pressures. Now there is clearly a difference between a process of setting limits and exerting pressures, whether by some external force or by the internal laws of a particular development, and that other process in which a subsequent content is essentially prefigured, predicted and controlled by a pre-existing external force. Yet it is fair to say, looking at many applications of Marxist cultural analysis, that it is the second sense, the notion of prefiguration, prediction or control, which has often explicitly or implicitly been used. Superstructure: Qualifications and Amendments The term of relationship is then the first thing that we have to examine in this proposition, but we have to do this by going on to look at the related terms themselves. ‘Superstructure’ has had most attention. People commonly speak of ‘the superstructure’, although it is interesting that originally, in Marx’s German, the term is in one important use plural. Other people speak of the different activities ‘inside’ the superstructure or superstructures. Now already in Marx himself, in the later correspondence of Engels, and at many points in the subsequent Marxist tradition, qualifications have been made about the determined character of certain superstructural activities. The first kind of qualification had to do with delays in time, with complications, and with certain indirect or relatively distant relationships. The simplest notion of a superstructure, 193 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

which is still by no means entirely abandoned, had been the reflection, the imitation or the reproduction of the reality of the base in the superstructure in a more or less direct way. Positivist notions of reflection and reproduction of course directly supported this. But since in many real cultural activities this relationship cannot be found, or cannot be found without effort or even violence to the material or practice being studied, the notion was introduced of delays in time, the famous lags; of various technical complications; and of indirectness, in which certain kinds of activity in the cultural sphere—philosophy, for example—were situated at a greater distance from the primary economic activities. That was the first stage of qualification of the notion of superstructure: in effect, an operational qualification. The second stage was related but more fundamental, in that the process of the relationship itself was more substantially looked at. This was the kind of reconsideration which gave rise to the modern notion of ‘mediation’, in which something more than simple reflection or reproduction—indeed something radically different from either reflection or reproduction—actively occurs. In the later twentieth century, there is the notion of ‘homologous structures’, where there may be no direct or easily apparent similarity, and certainly nothing like reflection or reproduction, between the superstructural process and the reality of the base, but in which there is an essential homology or correspondence of structures, which can be discovered by analysis. This is not the same notion as ‘mediation’, but it is the same kind of amendment in that the relationship between the base and the superstructure is not supposed to be direct, nor simply operationally subject to lags and complications and indirectness, but that of its nature it is not direct reproduction. These qualifications and amendments are important. But it seems to me that what has not been looked at with equal care, is the received notion of the base. And indeed, I would argue that the base is the more important concept to look at if we are to understand the realities of cultural process. In many uses of the proposition of base and superstructure, as a matter of verbal habit, ‘the base’ has come to be considered virtually as an object, or in less crude cases, it has been considered in essentially uniform and usually static ways. ‘The base’ is the real social existence of man. ‘The base’ is the real relations of production corresponding to a stage of the development of material productive forces. ‘The base’ is a mode of production at a particular stage of its development. We make and repeat propositions of this kind, but the usage is then very different from Marx’s emphasis on productive activities, in particular structural relations, constituting the foundation of all other activities. 194 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

For while a particular stage of the development of production can be discovered and made precise by analysis, it is never in practice either uniform or static. It is indeed one of the central propositions of Marx’s sense of history that there are deep contradictions in the relationships of production and in the consequent social relationships. There is therefore the continual possibility of the dynamic variation of these forces. Moreover, when these forces are considered, as Marx always considers them, as the specific activities and relationships of real men, they mean something very much more active, more complicated and more contradictory than the developed metaphorical notion of ‘the base’ could possibly allow us to realize. Base and Productive Forces So, we have to say that when we talk of ‘the base’, we are talking of a process and not a state. And we cannot ascribe to that process certain fixed properties for subsequent deduction to the variable processes of the superstructure. Most people who have wanted to make the ordinary proposition more reasonable have concentrated on refining the notion of superstructure. But I would say that each term of the proposition has to be revalued in a particular direction. We have to revalue ‘determination’ towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content. We have to revalue ‘superstructure’ towards a related range of cultural practices, and away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content. And, crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process. It is worth observing one further implication behind the customary definitions. ‘The base’ has come to include, especially in certain 20th-century developments, a strong and limiting sense of basic industry. The emphasis on heavy industry, even, has played a certain cultural role. And this raises a more general problem, for we find ourselves forced to look again at the ordinary notion of ‘productive forces. Clearly what we are examining in the base is primary productive forces. Yet some very crucial distinctions have to be made here. It is true that in his analysis of capitalist production Marx considered ‘productive work’ in a very particular and specialized sense corresponding to that mode of production. There is a difficult passage in the Grundrisse in 195 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

which he argues that while the man who makes a piano is a productive worker, there is a real question whether the man who distributes the piano is also a productive worker; but he probably is, since he contributes to the realization of surplus value. Yet when it comes to the man who plays the piano, whether to himself or to others, there is no question: he is not a productive worker at all. So piano-maker is base, but pianist superstructure. As a way of considering cultural activity, and incidentally the economics of modern cultural activity, this is very clearly a dead-end. But for any theoretical clarification it is crucial to recognize that Marx was there engaged in an analysis of a particular kind of production, that is capitalist commodity production. Within his analysis of that mode, he had to give to the notion of ‘productive labour’ and ‘productive forces’ a specialized sense of primary work on materials in a form which produced commodities. But this has narrowed remarkably, and in a cultural context very damagingly, from his more central notion of productive forces, in which, to give just brief reminders, the most important thing a worker ever produces is himself, himself in the fact of that kind of labour, or the broader historical emphasis of men producing themselves, themselves and their history. Now when we talk of the base, and of primary productive forces, it matters very much whether we are referring, as in one degenerate form of this proposition became habitual, to primary production within the terms of capitalist economic relationships, or to the primary production of society itself, and of men themselves, material production and reproduction of real life. If we have the broad sense of productive forces, we look at the whole question of the base differently, and we are then less tempted to dismiss as superstructural, and in that sense as merely secondary, certain vital productive social forces, which are in the broad sense, from the beginning, basic. Uses of Totality Yet, because of the difficulties of the ordinary proposition of base and superstructure, there was an alternative and very important development, an emphasis primarily associated with Lukacs, on a social ‘totality’. The totality of social practices was opposed to this layered notion of a base and a consequent superstructure. This totality of practices is compatible with the notion of social being determining consciousness, but it does not understand this process in terms of a base and a superstructure. Now the language of totality has become common, and it is indeed in many ways more acceptable than the notion of base and superstructure. But with one very important reservation. It is very easy for the notion of 196 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

totality to empty of its essential content the original Marxist proposition. For if we come to say that society is composed of a large number of social practices which form a concrete social whole, and if we give to each practice a certain specific recognition, adding only that they interact, relate and combine in very complicated ways, we are at one level much more obviously talking about reality, but we are at another level withdrawing from the claim that there is any process of determination. And this I, for one, would be very unwilling to do. Indeed, the key question to ask about any notion of totality in cultural theory is this: whether the notion of totality includes the notion of intention. For if totality is simply concrete, if it is simply the recognition of a large variety of miscellaneous and contemporaneous practices, then it is essentially empty of any content that could be called Marxist. Intention, the notion of intention, restores the key question, or rather the key emphasis. For while it is true that any society is a complex whole of such practices, it is also true that any society has a specific organization, a specific structure, and that the principles of this organization and structure can be seen as directly related to certain social intentions, intentions by which we define the society, intentions which in all our experience have been the rule of a particular class. One of the unexpected consequences of the crudeness of the base/superstructure model has been the too easy acceptance of models which appear less crude—models of totality or of a complex whole—but which exclude the facts of social intention, the class character of a particular society and so on. And this reminds us of how much we lose if we abandon the superstructural emphasis altogether. Thus, I have great difficulty in seeing processes of art and thought as superstructural in the sense of the formula as it is commonly used. But in many areas of social and political thought—certain kinds of ratifying theory, certain kinds of law, certain kinds of institutions, which after all in Marx’s original formulations were very much part of the superstructure—in all that kind of social apparatus, and in a decisive area of political and ideological activity and construction, if we fail to see a superstructural element, we fail to recognize reality at all. These laws, constitutions, theories, ideologies, which are claimed as natural, or as having universal validity or significance, simply have to be seen as expressing and ratifying the domination of a particular class. Indeed, the difficulty of revising the formula of base and superstructure has had much to do with the perception of many militants—who have to fight such institutions and notions as well as 197 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

fighting economic battles—that if these institutions and their ideologies are not perceived as having that kind of dependent and ratifying relationship, if their claims to universal validity or legitimacy are not denied and fought, then the class character of the society can no longer be seen. And this has been the effect of some versions of totality as the description of cultural process. Indeed, I think that we can properly use the notion of totality only when we combine it with that other crucial Marxist concept of ‘hegemony’. The Complexity of Hegemony It is Gramsci’s great contribution to have emphasized hegemony, and also to have understood it at a depth which is, I think, rare. For hegemony supposes the existence of something which is truly total, which is not merely secondary or superstructural, like the weak sense of ideology, but which is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the limit of common sense for most people under its sway, that it corresponds to the reality of social experience very much more clearly than any notions derived from the formula of base and superstructure. For if ideology were merely some abstract imposed notions, if our social and political and cultural ideas and assumptions and habits were merely the result of specific manipulation, of a kind of overt training which might be simply ended or withdrawn, then the society would be very much easier to move and to change than in practice it has ever been or is. This notion of hegemony as deeply saturating the consciousness of a society seems to be fundamental. And hegemony has the advantage over general notions of totality, that it at the same time emphasizes the facts of domination. Yet there are times when I hear discussions of hegemony and feel that it too, as a concept, is being dragged back to the relatively simple, uniform and static notion which ‘superstructure’ in ordinary use had become. Indeed, I think that we have to give a very complex account of hegemony if we are talking about any real social formation. Above all we have to give an account which allows for its elements of real and constant change. We have to emphasize that hegemony is not singular; indeed, that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified. That is why instead of speaking simply of ‘the hegemony’, ‘a hegemony’, I would propose a model which allows for this kind of variation and contradiction, its sets of alternatives and its processes of change. 198 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

But one thing that is evident in some of the best Marxist cultural analysis is that it is very much more at home in what one might call epochal questions than in what one has to call historical questions. That is to say, it is usually very much better at distinguishing the large features of different epochs of society, as between feudal and bourgeois, or what might be, than at distinguishing between different phases of bourgeois society, and different moments within the phases: that true historical process which demands a much greater precision and delicacy of analysis than the always striking epochal analysis which is concerned with main lineaments and features. Now the theoretical model which I have been trying to work with is this. I would say first that in any society, in any particular period, there is a central system of practices, meanings and values, which we can properly call dominant and effective. This implies no presumption about its value. All I am saying is that it is central. Indeed, I would call it a corporate system, but this might be confusing, since Gramsci uses ‘corporate’ to mean the subordinate as opposed to the general and dominant elements of hegemony. In any case what I have in mind is the central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived. That is why hegemony is not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of the nature of man and of his world. It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. But this is not, except in the operation of a moment of abstract analysis, in any sense a static system. On the contrary we can only understand an effective and dominant culture if we understand the real social process on which it depends: I mean the process of incorporation. The modes of incorporation are of great social significance, and incidentally in our kind of society have considerable economic significance. The educational institutions are usually the main agencies of the transmission of an effective dominant culture, and this is now a major economic as well as cultural activity; indeed, it is both in the same moment. Moreover, at a philosophical level, at the true level of theory and at the level of the history of various practices, there is a process which I call the selective 199 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

tradition: that which, within the terms of an effective dominant culture, is always passed off as ‘the tradition’, ‘the significant past’. But always the selectivity is the point; the way in which from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded. Even more crucially, some of these meanings and practices are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture. The processes of education; the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family; the practical definitions and organisation of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level: all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture, and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, its reality depends. If what we learn there were merely an imposed ideology, or if it were only the isolable meanings and practices of the ruling class, or of a section of the ruling class, which gets imposed on others, occupying merely the top of our minds, it would be—and one would be glad—a very much easier thing to overthrow. It is not only the depths to which this process reaches, selecting and organizing and interpreting our experience. It is also that it is continually active and adjusting; it isn’t just the past, the dry husks of ideology which we can more easily discard. And this can only be so, in a complex society, if it is something more substantial and more flexible than any abstract imposed ideology. Thus, we have to recognize the alternative meanings and values, the alternative opinions and attitudes, even some alternative senses of the world, which can be accommodated and tolerated within a particular effective and dominant culture. This has been much under-emphasized in our notions of a superstructure, and even in some notions of hegemony. And the under-emphasis opens the way for retreat to an indifferent complexity. In the practice of politics, for example, there are certain truly incorporated modes of what are nevertheless, within those terms, real oppositions, that are felt and fought out. Their existence within the incorporation is recognizable by the fact that, whatever the degree of internal conflict or internal variation, they do not in practice go beyond the limits of the central effective and dominant definitions. This is true, for example, of the practice of parliamentary politics, though its internal oppositions are real. It is true about a whole range of practices and arguments, in any real society, which can by no means be reduced to an 200 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)