USES* OF THEORY IN YOUR FUTURE
AS A LIT MAJOR
"All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war." (Benjamin)
"Everything in consumer society has taken on an aesthetic dimension." (Jameson)
"Every man [and woman] is an intellectual" (Gramsci).
One proposition repeatedly advanced in this course: aesthetics, the study of art, is to some degree or another political (in the broad sense of 'having to do with alignments of power in the social realm'). A purely formalistic analysis of a text's intrinsic properties and structures tells us nothing about the values surrounding that text's different reception over time; it does not account for historical change. Attempts to locate a permanent, self-evident, unchanging value in a particular text (Arnold) are weakened by the cold facts of readerly disagreement. However, attempts to account for this readerly disagreement by retreating into a transcendent idea of the mind's faculty of taste (Kant) also assume some rock-bottom universal sameness.
When confronting a text, you could interrogate its relationship to "the political" in the following ways:
What are its historical conditions of possibility? Jameson enjoins us to "always historicize," but cautions us against seeing History as nothing more than an antiquarian "context" for texts, safely removed from our own concerns. What this means is that we need to be sensitive to the historical specificity of the moment/place in which it was produced (for him and for other materialist critics, this means its relationship to the economic mode of production), while insisting on seeing our own position in a historical trajectory as well.
In what ways, and under what conditions, was it produced as "literature"? Guillory's canon critique alerts us to the fact that "Literature" is not a single static object, but a constantly changing category which reveals the uses of artistic taste as a form of power. Bourdieu: "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." The notion of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Guillory) suggests we ask, what institutions have consecrated this work, and why? How is a certain kind of basic or specialized literacy needed to access it?
How is it ideological? By this we don't mean to produce "politically correct" readings which identify and judge characters in a book as positive or negative role models. Ideology is to be understood not as "false consciousness," or as a term with which to dismiss a kind of politics you don't like, but an inescapable fact: ideologies are those notions that seek to be naturalized in the collective mind as "instinctively" true and right, but that play a role in maintaining a particular set of relationships of power (Althusser). Moreover, the central categories through which we are receiving the text ("literature," "culture," "civilization") are also ideological.
How is it understood through an author-function? Thinking about the Author as a guiding genius who is responsible for the text is a particularly modern idea; notions of authorship change over time and have an ideological function as well.
How might readers/audiences experience it? Is the reader/consumer a subjected subject (Althusser)? The idea of the fully constituted, fully empowered individual has come under fire (Foucault).
* Is there room for the reader or receiver of a (necessarily ideological) text to become a "producer," a "poet of their own act" (Certeau: "this mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment")? Or, in Gramsci's terms (adopted by Hall), an agent?
What do its genre and form tell us about its relations to the world?
* No cultural work is produced out of nothing: it defines itself in relation to or against other works in a genre. The "creator" or author is inserted into a specific social space and defines her/his project within that space (Bourdieu).* Literary/cultural genres have political resonance: one can read parallels between the way that genres like tragedy function and the way the story of history itself functions (Williams). Form both expresses Utopian political longings and contains them (Jameson). Genres function by repetition and familiarity.
Where does it fit in the history of technological reproduction? This does not have to do only with cinema, TV, or the internet: the book is a technology; so is a handwritten manuscript. Benjamin: mass reproduction changes art's status as authentic original, its ritualized presence in time and space. But it also takes culture out of the hands of the priests and makes the "copy" available for a much wider range of people.
What is its status as commodity and how is it positioned in the culture industry?
* Reproduction and standardization: how do forms and genres which function by repetition/ familiarity work?* This is not only applicable to image-driven media culture: see Radway on the commodification of "the classic."
In what ways, and under what conditions, am I receiving it as "literature"?
* Every relationship of hegemony is an educational relationship (Gramsci). Your and my position in the instutitional apparatus of education. How does it produce consent?* Moreover, knowledge itself is implicated in relations of social power (Foucault, Mignolo). The academic "discipline" is yet another institution with an interest in social control.
USES OF THEORY IN YOUR FUTURE AS A PRODUCER / CONSUMER / ANALYST OF LITERARY-CULTURAL OBJECTS
(i.e., in the rest of your life):
Now you know that "Literature" (as opposed, in a bookstore, to "Fiction"; or as opposed to broader "culture") is a category constructed within class and power relations. What you do with that knowledge is of course up to you.
Culture is a battlefield. "Cultures, conceived not as separate 'ways of life' but as 'ways of struggle,' constantly intersect. . . Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured." (Hall). Consider the implications for your future involvement in public policy and educational institutions.
*Caveat against seeing theoretical knowledge as an instrument to "use." "Cultivated philistines are in the habit of requiring that art 'give' them something" (Adorno). Consider the possibility that "useless knowledge" may have emancipatory potential.