Modern Criticism and Theory

A Reader

Nigel Wood, David Lodge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317868002
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This third edition of Modern Criticism and Theory represents a major expansion on its previous incarnations with some twenty five new pieces or essays included. This expansion has two principal purposes. Firstly, in keeping with the collection's aim to reflect contemporary preoccupations, the reader has expanded forward to include such newly emergent considerations as ecocriticism and post-theory.

Secondly, with the aim of presenting as broad an account of modern theory as possible, the reader expands backwards to to take in exemplary pieces by formative writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Marx, Freud and Virginia Woolf.. This radical expansion of content is prefaced by a wide-ranging introduction, which provides a rationale for the collection and demonstrates how connections can be made between competing theories and critical schools.

The purpose of the collection remains that of introducing the reader to the guiding concepts of contemporary literary and cultural debate. It does so by presenting substantial extracts from seminal thinkers and surrounding them with the contextual materials necessary to a full understanding. Each selection has a headnote, which gives biographical details of the author and provides suggestions for further reading, and footnotes that help explain difficult references. The collection is ordered both historically and thematically and readers are encouraged to draw for themselves connections between essays and theories.

Modern Criticism and Theory has long been regarded as a necessary collection. Now revised for the twenty first century it goes further and provides students and the general reader with a wide-ranging survey of the complex landscape of modern theory and a critical assessment of the way we think – and live – in the world today.

1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-1

Introductory note

Marx (1818–1883) and Engels (1820–1895) first met in Cologne in 1842, but their most productive working period was in Britain from 1845 on, in both Manchester and London. These extracts from The German Ideology (written, 1845–46; published, 1932) illustrate what they regarded as a materialist view of history in their first large-scale attempt to formulate the bases of their disagreement with the ideas of G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) and his imitators, the young Hegelians. Principally in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel had conceived of the historical process as the working out of a dialectic whereby meaning and truth are never fixed entities, but are rather staging posts in a progress towards a basic unity or Geist (‘Spirit’) when there would be an absolute knowledge that the world was really an emanation of spiritual understanding or contemplation. Reason is an important tool in this, but it is only that: Geist is the highest form of enlightenment, and its attainment is the goal of all historical striving, a process of periodic Aufhebung, or upheaval/cancellation that introduces emergent social forms amidst residual practices – but the motive force is thought guided by reason.

This reassuring sense of history, that it is a record of gradual improvement as Man develops an awareness of others, reflected well on much of the nineteenth-century’s rapid material progress, yet Marx and Engels were more struck by the unequal distribution of its benefits, and that history seemed to provide more of an account of material struggle and occasional decline. The theory of history they favoured is most clearly expressed in the Preface to Marx’s A Critique of Political Economy (1858–59), where a consideration of ‘material conditions of life’ is a way of understanding many abstract and apparently separate beliefs: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’ Furthermore, in order to be socially and materially productive (in ‘the social production of their life’), Man enters into ‘definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will’ (Karl Marx: selected writings, ed. David McLellan [1977], p. 389) The basic – and systemic – economy of life, how one produces and under what conditions, is the prime motive force, refracted within superstructural prohibitions and supposed freedoms allowed by legal and educational systems as well as religious codes. The Base determines human behaviour in ways that are often hidden from individuals by superstructural forces that give the impression that they are open to change and evolution; if they are, then their effect will not be significantly different so long as the capitalist system prevails. In many of the writings collected together in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (first pub. in 1932; trans. 1959), it is clear that Marx was struck by the alienation that the working classes experienced, a desperation so deep that it created a hopelessness about any changes to their condition. Appropriating the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, most consistently his views in The Essence of Christianity (1841), Marx and Engels drew a clear line between their investigations and the Enlightenment faith in rational self-improvement, noted in Rousseau and Condorcet as well as Feuerbach. The object of philosophy is to have a material effect on the conditions of life, not to accustom men and women to their lot. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and Capital (vol. 1: 1867; trans. 1886; vols. 2 and 3: 1885, 1894 [ed. Engels]; trans. 1907, 1909), Marx and Engels developed their sense of the workings of ideology, its inevitable and pervasively restraining forces of containment. In short, history moves forward towards an eventual overthrow of this system through a process of dialectical materialism, that is, a set of antithetical turns, action and reaction, all conditioned ultimately by materialist concerns – and not in accordance with a rational and incremental grasp of the situation, where individuals can be sure to determine the course of events.

The German Ideology never found a publisher in its authors’ lifetimes. (It eventually appeared in 1932.) It is a clear expression of just what the ‘realism’ of their undertaking might be, how investigations should start at those social relations that determine how artists produce art, how it is distributed, how it is read or seen, and how it reflects a relationship to prevailing ideology. To this end, art can never be disinterested or simply created for its own sake. Artists may indeed believe that, but a materialist analysis will show that that is a faith that rarely survives the study or studio. Artworks have a place in a real world, and even the most spiritual sentiments take a particular form in it, derived from actual labour in its production. Raymond Williams was to extend this sense of materialist perspective to the practice of imaginative creation; the book is a product, part mental, part physical, and its presence in the canon (now) and on the bookshelves then as now, is not an effect of natural selection , but rather the effect of certain interests (see his ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ [1973]). The raw materials for artistic production are transindividual, even if expressed in an apparently original way: ‘we have to break from the common procedure of isolating the object and then discovering its components. On the contrary, we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions’ (Problems in Materialism and Culture [1980], p. 47). The most significant works are, therefore, not simply those that deploy strikingly original or complex art, but those that allow readers or spectators to realize the specificity of their historical situation and that strengthen a belief in collective human action and possibility.

Cross-references

• Fanon
• Brecht
• Foucault
• Williams
• Said
• Jameson
• Eagleton

Commentary

• LouisAlthusser, For Marx (1965; trans. 1969)
• Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1970; trans. 1971)
• RaymondWilliams, ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ – first given as a lecture in Montreal in 1973, then written up for The New Left Review, 82, (Nov.–Dec., 1973), and reprinted in Williams’s Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980), pp. 31–49
• Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977)
• FredricJameson, The Political Unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act (1981)
• TerryEagleton, Ideology: an introduction (1991), especially pp. 63–91
• WilliamAdams, ‘Aesthetics: liberating the senses’, in TerrellCarver (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx (1991), pp. 246–274
• AlexCallinicos, Making History: agency, structure and change in social theory (2004)
• RossAbbinnett, Marxism after Modernity: politics, technology and social transformation (2006)

The German Ideology

Preface

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and – existing reality will collapse.

These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young Hegelian philosophy,¹ which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation.

1 Exemplified by Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) and Max Stirner’s The Ego and its Own (1844), the Young Hegelians regarded human action as the result of an unfolding of mind or spirit (Geist), a potential that, eventually, could be said to guide all action and material development.

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This honest fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany. …

The Premisses of the Materialist Method

The premisses from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premisses from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premisses can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premiss of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic, and so on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.

This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its turn this presupposes the intercourse of individuals with one another. The form of this intercourse is again determined by production.

The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour, and internal intercourse. This statement is generally recognized. But not only the relation of one nation to others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse. How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labour has been carried.² Each new productive force, in so far as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further development of the division of labour.

2 Marx’s explanation, here, suggests a rather more predictable evolution of capitalism, yet it is in the nature of all dialectical theories of history that there may be unpredictable clashes of interest along the way. Crucially, the gradual divorce of the particular form of labour in which one is involved from the self is fostered by market capitalism; see section 3, ‘The Method of Political Economy’, in the Grundrisse (1857–58).

The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time, through the division of labour inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals cooperating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry, and commerce (patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen (given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one another.

The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labour.

The first form of ownership is tribal ownership. It corresponds to the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts, or, in the highest stage, agriculture. In the latter case it presupposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the natural division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore, limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops gradually with the increase of population, the growth of wants, and with the extension of external relations, both of war and of barter.

The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds especially from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal ownership we already find movable, and later also immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in their community, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to the form of communal ownership. It is the communal private property which compels the active citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this communal ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the same measure as, in particular, immovable private property evolves. The division of labour is already more developed. We already find the antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism between those states which represent town interests and those which represent country interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between industry and maritime commerce. The class relation between citizens and slaves is now completely developed.

With the development of private property, we find here for the first time the same conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensive scale, with modern private property. On the one hand, the concentration of private property, which began very early in Rome (as the Licinian agrarian law proves)³ and proceeded very rapidly from the time of the civil wars and especially under the Emperors; on the other hand, coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat, which, however, owing to its intermediate position between propertied citizens and slaves, never achieved an independent development.

3 The Licinian Rogations (376–367 B.C.) aimed to lessen the gap between plebeians and patricians by admitting the former to some consular powers, even the office of consul itself, and also inaugurated a process of land-sharing and small-scale land owning.

The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country. This differing starting-point was determined by the sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with it. The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organization of the conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution. Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community, the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed, there also arises antagonism towards the towns. The hierarchical structure of landownership, and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over the serfs....