is there life after structuralism?

6
PETER BARRY Is there life after Structuralism? It has long been evident that literary studies have entered a new ice-age of theory, and that the glaciers are still advancing. Methuen’s New Accents series is in the forefront of this concerted drive to’de-Humanise’ the study of literature, and the latest volume - Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice - deserves close attention because it is so typical in so many ways of the con- temporary anti-Humanist, quasi-Behaviourist approach to literature. The author advocates a method based on Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psycho-analysis, with Derridean trimmings’ and this heavyweight luggage considerably hampers her engagement with actual works of literature, as may be imagined. Indeed, it is a sign of Belsey’s tactlessness that in her sec- ond chapter she sees nothing anomalous in using six perfume advertise- ments to demonstrate the workings of literary realism. Meaning, she tells us, is constructed ’by reproducing what is familiar‘ (p. 47)’ and the process, she believes, can be illustrated ’by reference to a non-literary signifying system, advertising’. She then examines the six perfume advertisements and draws close parallels between the images of women they present and the presenta- tion of Dorothea Brooke in the opening pages of Middlemarch. Thus, Dorothea, like the women portrayed in advertisements for Charlie and Blase, is ‘an assembly of semes’ made from pre-existing ’signifying systems’ and from ‘codes’ which are ‘already part of OUT knowledge’. What is most evi- dent in such an account of how a novel is written is Structuralism’s curious fear of authorship: there is an obsessive determination here to prove that writ- ing is not an inventive act and that everything is m e d y assembled passively by the author from already available materials. Yet even if we accepted the popular mechanistic jargon about ’codes‘ and ’systems’ we would still not have to accept that there is any significant parallel betweenMiddlernarch and the advertisements, for nothing of any interest is proved by pointing out (or finding out) that an anonymous row of semis and an architectural master- piece are made of bricks bought from the same builder‘s merchant - such information is only of interest to those who are more interested in bricks than in buildings. If Catherine Belsey really believes that Dorothea was created simply by combining a set of ‘genuinely familiarsemes,’ and that meaning in general is constructed by reproducing what is familiar, then there is little that can be said - to her - but Structuralists who care at all about intellectual cogency need to re-examine the foolish illusion that talking about raw mater- ials will produce worthwhile insights about the finished product: there is a *Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice. Methuen, €5.95 (hardback), €2.75 (paperback).

Upload: peter-barry

Post on 30-Sep-2016

218 views

Category:

Documents


4 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Is there life after Structuralism?

PETER BARRY

Is there life after Structuralism? It has long been evident that literary studies have entered a new ice-age of theory, and that the glaciers are still advancing. Methuen’s New Accents series is in the forefront of this concerted drive to’de-Humanise’ the study of literature, and the latest volume - Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice - deserves close attention because it is so typical in so many ways of the con- temporary anti-Humanist, quasi-Behaviourist approach to literature. The author advocates a method based on Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psycho-analysis, with Derridean trimmings’ and this heavyweight luggage considerably hampers her engagement with actual works of literature, as may be imagined. Indeed, it is a sign of Belsey’s tactlessness that in her sec- ond chapter she sees nothing anomalous in using six perfume advertise- ments to demonstrate the workings of literary realism. Meaning, she tells us, is constructed ’by reproducing what is familiar‘ (p. 47)’ and the process, she believes, can be illustrated ’by reference to a non-literary signifying system, advertising’. She then examines the six perfume advertisements and draws close parallels between the images of women they present and the presenta- tion of Dorothea Brooke in the opening pages of Middlemarch. Thus, Dorothea, like the women portrayed in advertisements for Charlie and Blase, is ‘an assembly of semes’ made from pre-existing ’signifying systems’ and from ‘codes’ which are ‘already part of OUT knowledge’. What is most evi- dent in such an account of how a novel is written is Structuralism’s curious fear of authorship: there is an obsessive determination here to prove that writ- ing is not an inventive act and that everything is m e d y assembled passively by the author from already available materials. Yet even if we accepted the popular mechanistic jargon about ’codes‘ and ’systems’ we would still not have to accept that there is any significant parallel betweenMiddlernarch and the advertisements, for nothing of any interest is proved by pointing out (or finding out) that an anonymous row of semis and an architectural master- piece are made of bricks bought from the same builder‘s merchant - such information is only of interest to those who are more interested in bricks than in buildings. If Catherine Belsey really believes that Dorothea was created simply by combining a set of ‘genuinely familiar semes,’ and that meaning in general is constructed by reproducing what is familiar, then there is little that can be said - to her - but Structuralists who care at all about intellectual cogency need to re-examine the foolish illusion that talking about raw mater- ials will produce worthwhile insights about the finished product: there is a

*Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice. Methuen, €5.95 (hardback), €2.75 (paperback).

Page 2: Is there life after Structuralism?

Is there life after Structuralism? 73

fundamental problem of method here to which they have not so far addres- sed themselves, in spite of all their talk of method.

But the de-Humanising thrust of Critical Practice is not confined to the now commonplace denigration of authorship. Its central tenet is that Structural- ist theories have successfully challenged the commonsensical view that ’valuable literary texts . . . tell truths - about the period which produced them, about the world in general or about human nature - and that in doing so they express the particular perceptions, the individual insights, of their authors’ (p. 2). The implication here is that the generality of readers go to lit- erature looking for guaranteed wisdom about life, but do they? Surely most of us expect literature to explore aspects of the age and of the world in gen- eral, rather than to ‘tell truths’ about it. That literature has something to say (or to ask) about the world is beyond doubt, one would think, but it is doubted by Catherine Belsey who insists, predictably enough, that ‘com- mon sense itself is ideologically and discursively constructed, rooted in a specific historical situation and operating in conjunction with a particular social formation’ (p. 3), meaning in effect, that literature reflects ideology, not the world, and comes from ideology rather than from the mind of an individual author. It is odd, of course, that while this brand of Structuralism pours scorn on the notion that literature might ever unproblematically reflect ’the world’, it sees nothing anomalous in supposing that it does just that with ideology. Given, too, that ideology is defined later as (among other things) the sum of the ways people live (p. 42) it seems a little strange that it is not itself regarded as being part of the world. But perhaps the most dis- turbing aspect of the approach to literature recommended in this book is its relentless attack on ’the humanist assumption that subjectivity, the indi- vidual mind or inner being, is the source of meaning and of action’ (p. 3). There is something chilling - in the light of twentieth century history - about this ruthless subjection of individual to system. For instance, the author believes that meaning is produced not by the individual ’subject’ but, bizarrely, by the language system itself; ’it is language itself which offers the possibility of meaning’, she tells us (p. 17) and therefore ’common sense’ is mistaken in supposing ‘that ”man” is the origin and source of meaning, of action, and of history’ (p. 7) . This ploy of eliminating the thinking human ’subject‘ and positing instead a system capable independently of stimulus, ingestion, and response is essentially Behaviourist in spirit, and the argu- ment on which it is based is patently fallacious. Since ‘I’ and ’you‘ are ling- uistic terms, this argument runs, they are signs like any other and therefore cannot refer to ‘given entities’ already existing in ’the world. Like all linguis- tic terms, in the view of some Structuralists, they can only be defined in terms of distinctions which exist in language only, hence ‘it is language

Page 3: Is there life after Structuralism?

74 Critical Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3

which provides the possibility of subjectivity because it is language which enables the speaker to posit himself or herself as “I”, as the subject of a sen- tence. It is through language that people constitute themselves as subjects’ (p. 59). Of course, we cannot c d ourselves anything except by using language, just as we cannot knock a nail into a piece of wood without using a hammer, but is is odd to say that language enables us to name ourselves, and hence conceive of ourselves, as if language were the agent instead of just the instrument in the act of self-constitution, just as it would be odd to attribute the ability to knock in nails to hammers rather than to their users. Given that hammers are man-made there seems no reason to suppose them to be in any way superior to their users, or to imagine the user merely a minor adjunct of the hammer. Yet this is precisely what Jacques Derrida does in the case of language, for according to him Saussure reminded us that ’language. . . is not a function of the speaking subject, . . the subject. . . is a function of lan- guage’ (quoted on p. 59). This fetishistic worship of language is the logical cul-de-sac we are brought to by Structuralism’s ’decentring of the individual consciousness so that it can no longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge, and action’ (p. 60). It is a universe, surely, of unutterable drab- ness, which is peopleless, and where ‘discourses articulate concepts through a system of signs which signify by means of their relationship to each other rather than to entities in the world’ (p. 46). But it should be seen for what it is- not reality, but a nightmare which is characteristic of our times.

As might be deduced from the statement just quoted, Critical Practice insists upon another article of faith much beloved by New Accents authors, the view that there is ’no unmediated experience of the world; knowledge is possible only through the categories and the laws of the symbolic order‘ (p. 45). The symbolic order includes, as well as language, everything which is ’socially invested with meaning‘, such as images, gestures, social behaviour, clothes, and so on, which makes it a vastly over-ambitious non-concept, like the term ‘ideology’ itself in Belsey’s usage. If it were in fact true that there can be no unmediated experience of the world it would be a truth that could never be discovered, for discovering it would necessarily involve stepping outside the supposedly-impenetrable mediating factors and thus disprov- ing it at the same time. Given such views, however, it is understandable that the author holds little brief for any form of literature associated with the term ’realism’, but the naive condemnation of the ‘classic realist‘ novel is perhaps the most ill-founded position adopted in this book, which is saying a good deal. Once again, the grounds of the condemnation are completely predict- able, and this inability to spring any surprises is perhaps the most depres- sing characteristic of the kind of criticism represented here. The author

Page 4: Is there life after Structuralism?

Is there life after Structuralism? 75

writes that a realist novel like Bleak House, ‘however critical of the world it describes, offers the reader a position, an attitude which is given as non- contradictory, fixed in “knowing” subjectivity. Classic realism cannot foreg- round contradiction. The logic of its structure - the movement towards closure - precludes the possibility of leaving the reader simply to confront the contradiction which the text may have defined. The hierarchy of dis- courses ensures that a transcendent level of knowledge “recognises” the contradictions of the world as tragic (inevitable), as is predominantly the case inHardy, or ironic, as in Bleak House, or resolved as in Sybil orJane Eyre’ (pp. 81-2). This is at odds with much else in the author‘s argument if lan- guage really is’a system of signs which signify by means of their relationship to each other rather than to entities in the world’, then quite obviously litera- ture will be incapable of making any reference at all to that world and will therefore be unable either to criticise the world or to lead readers to conclude that the world’s contradictions are inevitable. Either one takes the Saussurean-Derridean consensus on language (and hence literature) and believes that signs (words) can refer only to each other, so that literary mean- ings can only be intertextual or ’intexual‘, or one takes the Althusserian view that every aspect of a work, including formal aspects, embodies an ideological position (or, to say this clearly, makes an implicit statement about the world).

But the two positions are contradictory and cannot be blended to form a single system of the kind Catherine Belsey attempts to build. But let us see, in detail, why she believes that realism has inbuilt ideological tendencies. She tells us that realism in literature developed during the period of ’indus- trial capitalism’, and promises that ’I shall suggest in chapter 3 that the pro- cedures of expressive realism have certain ideological implications which may indicate that their development during this period is more than coinci- dental’ (p. 7). This ‘suggestion’ when it comes paraphrases Althusser to the effect that capitalism ‘needs subjects who work by themselves, who freely exchange their labour-power for wages‘ (p. 67). Thus, ’it is in the epoch of capitalism that ideology emphasises the value of individual freedom’ (ibid), and hence ’it is in the interests of this ideology above all to suppress the role of language in the construction of the subject. . . and to present the indi- vidual as a free, unified, autonomous subjectivity’ (ibid). Therefore, she con- cludes, classic realism ‘performs . . . the work of ideology, not only in its rep- resentation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader. . . the position of sub- ject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding‘ (ibid,).

So the argument runs, in summary: capitalism needs workers who regard

Page 5: Is there life after Structuralism?

76 Critical Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3

themselves as free agents making a voluntary exchange of labour for wages. To perform a voluntary act you have to see yourself as an undivided ’I’ and so any literary work which assumes such a subject as its reader supports the social foundations of capitalism. The underlying logic of all this is amazingly crude, but the major fault in the argument concerns what is left out. Briefly, it is not only capitalism which requires subjects who voluntarily undertake certain exchanges which presuppose free, unified, autonomously- subjective individuality - so do friendships, mamages, sexual liaisons, teacher-student relations, team games, religious organisations, revolutio- nary organisations, social-reform movements, and so on. If almost every social and personal interaction is like capitalism in the characteristic which Catherine Belsey chooses to single out it is difficult to see why it should be capitalism which realist writing implicitly supports rather than any or all of the others. As it is, in any case, the diagnosis of what is wrong with realism rests on the tenuous and highly theoretic distinction between defining a contradiction (which it can do) and foregrounding one (which it cannot). One wonders (despairingly) how something can be defined without at the same time being foregrounded, and realism’s supposed weakness in the matter of contradictions is all the more puzzling when we are informed in chapter 5 (on the authority of Barthes and Macherey, no less) that ‘contradic- tion is a condition of narrative’ (p. 106, my italics). So classic realism must con- tain contradictions and can define them, but cannot foreground them - a strange state of affairs.

In effect the critical practice which Catherine Belsey finally proposes is almost exclusively concerned with seeking out these contradictions which, since the text itself cannot foreground them, can - cunningly enough - only be exposed by critical intervention. The critic must ’seek not the unity of the work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incom- pleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions’ (p. 109). Inevitably this search for contradictions ’above all’ does nothing to enhance the status of the works which are examined. Even the Sherlock Holmes stones are belittled by this treatment, for when we are told that they ‘manifest the inedequacy of a bourgeois scien- tificity which, working within the constraints of ideology, is thus unable to challenge it’ (p. 116) we must feel that everything distinctive about the experience of reading these tales has been eliminated and that in return we have been offered nothing but a trite ‘message‘. Like all didactic approaches, this one renders the literary material redundant, since either we did not need to turn to literature to get such information about bourgeois scientific- ity, or else once the critic has foregrounded the information for us we can discard the stones or poems which contained it. This approach is ideal, of

Page 6: Is there life after Structuralism?

Is there life after Structuralism? 77

course, if we regard the discovered contradictions as more valuable than poems and novels (and it is unnecessary to add that there is a lot of that about), but if we happen not to believe this then Belsey’s approach can have little to offer us.

This book, then, represents what might be called Structuralist fundamen- talism, a sub-division of Structuralism which is characterised by its crusad- ing anti-Humanism, by its determination to apply neo-Freudian and neo- Marxist concepts to literature without modification and by its disregard of everything which is unique about the phenomenon and experience of litera- ture. It is without doubt one of the most reactionary forces at work today in academic life. The worst possible response to it is to take refuge in a naive and bluff empiricism, for we do need theory and the shake-up which the literary-academic establishment is receiving during the ice-age will probably prove beneficial in the end. But it is foolish to suppose that all we need is more theory. On the contrary, we need less theory than we have always had, and less, particularly, than we have now. What we do need isbeffer theory, and this is a need which Structuralist fundamentalism certainly cannot sup- ply. Genuine Structuralism can help us, but only if we enter into a systematic engagement with its arguments instead of welcoming it all indiscriminately on the grounds that it is, in some vague way, stimulating. The most urgent need, though, is for all parties to recognise thoughtless fundamentalism for what it is and not to mistake it for the real thing.

DAILY MIRROR STYLE - The Mirror‘s Way With Words

by Keith Waterhouse

Waterhouse’s witty dissection of the language of tabloid newspapers.

Available from Mirror Books Ltd., Athene House, 66/73 Shoe Lane, London EC4P 4AB. 01-822 3430. Price €3.50 plus 30p p & p.