Literature and History (3): From Text to Socio-Historical Contexts

Literature and History (3):From Text to Socio-Historical Contexts Michel Foucault, Marxism and Cultural Materialism (1) Historical Methods: Historicism & Official History (2) New Historicism (3) Marxism and Cultural Materialism

Outline: How do we describe social and historical context? • Foucault – discourse • Marxism and Ideology • Cultural Materialism • Raymond Williams’ “Structure of Feelings” • A. Gramsci’s Hegemony

Q & A What do you know about Foucault and New Historicism so far? • What are the definitions of discourse and how is it connected to power? • What does it mean to say that Foucault “historicize discourse” and “textualize history” (textbook: 116)

Foucault: traditional historicism vs. Archaelogy • Traditional Historicism – the ‘past’ as a unified entity, with coherent development and organized by fixed categories such as ‘author,’‘spirit,’‘period’ and ‘nation.’ • History as Archive: intersections of multiple discourses, with gaps and discontinuity, like book stacks in a library.  archeology: a painstaking rediscovery of struggles for meanings

Foucault: “historicize discourse” • Every sentiment is in a certain discourse, and thus historically conditioned. Textbook 117 • effective history: • knowledge as perspective, with slant and limitations; • working ‘without constants’ [fixed categories or truths]; • Working not to discover ‘ourselves,’ but to introduce discontinuity in histories as well as in us.

Context as Con-texts • Traditional view World Work: symbols, Characters, Allegory, etc.

Context as Con-texts Each square (small or large ones) here can be seen as a discourse (or group of texts).

Methodology (1): from text to context • Textual analysis; • Institutional analysis; • Analysis of society and history; • discourse analysis -- the text itself is already an interpretation; • 1. from the meaning of a text to the meaning structures (discourse) it is embedded in; (textbook 119) • 2. Disclose the relations between power and meanings.

Thick Description • To “sort out the structures [discourses] of signification” (119) • Cultures, people and texts, all as ‘ensemble of texts.’ (cockfight as an example 120-21)

Context and Social Contexts—A Marxist View • See textbook 125 • Superstructure, ultimately determined by base Text as a product

Ideology • How do we examine the relations between superstructure and base?

Ideology Defined • “rigid set of ideas”; e.g. somebody refrains from eating meat “for practical rather than ideological reasons.”--negative • ruling ideology: legitimating the power of the dominant group--negative • sets of ideas to justify certain organized social actions --could be positive or negative • ＊sets of ideas to justify certain actions while masking their real nature. –negative

Ideology Defined by Althusser (ref. textbook 129) • Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence. • Ideology has the function of constituting individual as subjects. (Interpellation) * Ideology is not any idea; it should be a system of ideas (representation) produced by some institutions (state apparatuses 國家機器)

Althusser’s Revision of Marxism • Sees Ideology –not as just ideas or “false consciousness” (which implies “true consciousness”); • Argues for Literature’s “Relative autonomy” from Base; it is determined by Base in the last instance (ultimately); • Explains both social structure and individual subject’s position in relation to ideology.

我以身為台灣人為榮。我以身為美國人為榮。 阿扁是台灣之子，是全民的總統。一日為師，終生為父。 Nationalism; patriotism; “The Taiwanese”; populism; ISA = school in patriarchal society; Ideologies: Examples • Which of the following are ideologies • produced by some ISA, distorting some reality ?

Social Structure—of Vulgar Marxist Ideology: the ruling ideas of the ruling class imposed on the other classes. • Superstructure • e.g. Literature of the middle class, • of proletariat Parallel, reflect Base(as foundation, center) relations of production, means of production

Literature/Culture & Economic Base relatively autonomous from; • reflect, embody, perform, transform, critique Over-Determination Social Levels Multiple Ideologies

Superstructure Base Social Formation -- de-centered • State Apparatuses (Repressive & Ideological) 警察學校軍隊 ISA 法院 RSA 文學家庭

主要意識形態 Superstructure 文學史；文類作者／讀者文學作品書局行銷文學生產方式；生產關係； Lit. work: Relative autonomous • over-determined; • economic influences mediated (媒介) through various ISA’s 學院

Ideology of a Text • Multiple Ideologies produced through • Content (e.g. theme of love, plot and character relations), • Form (e.g. stream of consciousness, bildungsroman, 俊男美女, pastiche) • in conjunction/disjunction with • Social ideologies • Ideologies of MP and LMP (the roles of internet, Facebook) • Authorial ideologies

Ideology: an Artistic Example • From Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538)

Ideology: an Artistic Example • To Manet’s Olympia (1863) pay attention to her gaze, her hand, the black woman and the black cat.

Ideology: An Artistic Example Manet’s Olympia (1863) pay attention to her gaze, her hand, the black woman and the black cat. • --multiple ideologies: • sexual capitalism critiqued by revising the meanings of nudity and flowers; • the blackness inscribed as a backdrop. • Form: shallow depth, strong color contrast

Literary Examples: “A Rose for Emily” • “A Rose for Emily” – • Ideologies of “love and death,” Emily = the South’s past • Form (e.g. we-witness narrator) • in conjunction/disjunction with • Social ideology – industrial capitalism • Ideologies of MP and LMP (unreliable narrator, rich symbolism) • Authorial ideology – guilt and nostalgia

Literary Examples: “Rip Van Winkle” • “Rip Van Winkle” – • Ideologies of “escape,” • Form (e.g. historicism, narrative frames) • in conjunction/disjunction with • Social ideology – Declaration of Independence as a glorious movement • Ideologies of MP and LMP (Knickerbockers as historian) • Authorial ideology – escape vs. political commitment

A Filmic Example: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button • Universal Theme of Love – mismatches more than perfect match of minds and ages

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button • American (male) innocence – thru’ a Pastiche of history • “But where Gump actively trivialized history, Benjamin Buttoneffectively ignores it: Although Benjamin briefly exchanges fire with a German submarine during World War II, and Hurricane Katrina makes a cameo toward the end, this movie about a white baby raised by a black adoptive mother during the inglorious years of the Jim Crow South never so much as addresses race once. (source)

Methodologies: Some Suggestions How do we connect text and context? • Class relations, economic determinism and the influences of (literary) relations of productionin or of the texts • Art and ideology: contradictions within some ideologies or between ideologies and reality in a text or a group of texts. (textbook 125-26) • Pierre Macherey: the Textual Unsaid

Pierre Macherey –the split text; the textual unsaid • A text is as split as a Lacanian subject. • Split between its overt (or intended) meaning and its unconscious–or the hidden (and unintended) meaning caused by • literary form; • contradictions in ideology; • the material conditions of production in the society in which the text is produced and consumed.

Pierre Macherey –the textual unsaid/unconscious • Is constructed in the moment of its entry into literary form.  literary genre (historical novel) and form (ending) as a constraint • Structure-- reveals not unity, homogeneity and autonomy, but defect, falsity and secrecy. (chap 1: 131) • the critics: do not look for “unity,” but for “the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings, its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot describe, and above all its contradictions.” (Belsey 109)

Pierre MachereyThe Said vs. the Unsaid • (chap 1: 130) … this meaning is not buried in its depths, masked or disguised; it is not a question of hunting it down with interpretations. It is not in the work but by its side: on its margins, at that limit where it ceases to be what it claims to be because it has reached back to the very conditions of its possibility. It is then no longer constituted by a factitious necessity, the product of a conscious or unconscious intention. • Chap 2: 194-95

the textual unsaid— example • Sherlock Holmes –福爾摩斯 Its pattern: enigma followed by disclosure (with total explicitness and scientific spirit);  Its ideologies: positivism and realism (as a lit. form) Its unsaid: The stories are “haunted by shadowy, mysterious and silent women.”

Cultural Materialism • studies the “contemporariness” of the text: the way in which they address their own present and our present, too” (chap 2: 188)—its moment of production, consumption, and the social relations it is embedded in. • a literary criticism that places texts in a material, that is socio-political or historical, context in order to show that canonical texts, e.g. Shakespeare, are bound up with a repressive, dominant ideology, yet also provide scope for dissidence. • examines ideas and categorize them as radical or non-radical according to whether they contribute to a historical vision of where we are and where we want to be. (Wilson 35-36).

Structure of Feeling • “The shape and organization of ideas and sentiments at particular times and in particular contexts” (189) • “as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible part of our activities.” –emergent, rather than systematized (chap 2: 189) • Williams stresses “the complex relation of differentiated structures of feeling” – e.g. Jane Austen: emergent acquisitive capitalism, interlocking with agrarian capitalism (190)

Structure of Feeling • ’practical consciousness of a present kind . . . a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating.’ • feeling’chosen to ”to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology,’ instead focusing on ‘specifically affective elements of consciousness,’ ‘meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.’ (Hendler 10) • Note: 1) Williams finds “ideology” too formal and limited. 2) For him, culture is “a whole way of life”

Structure of Feeling -- examples • Themes of Nostalgia & Migration/Wandering in Yu Kuang-chung and Campus Folksong in the 70’s • e.g. Taiwanese novels in the 80’s: 「歷史的記憶與遺忘」、「政治小說的抗拒手勢」、「政治的大眾化與現實的折射」，以及「女性身影的凝望與浮顯」、「後現代的都會景致」(陳明柔 ) • e.g. Taipei City in Taiwanese films: • visiting Taipei in the 60’s and 70’s • 《家在台北》 --1970 • Taipei critiqued as a modern city – 1980’s • Taipei as a postmodern city – 1990’s ~

From Ideology to Hegemony • Hegemony = Dominant Ideology, but not always controlling us; • Gramsci: considers the role of the organic intellectual and competing hegemonies. • “Cultural materialists have used Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as a cultural process and his arguments about the relationship between common sense and ideology to explore the ways in which popular texts may articulate struggles for cultural power and shifts in belief systems, between dominant and subordinate social groups or forces” (chap 2: 191).

Hegemony: control by consent • Ideological leadership; consensual control; • "...Dominant groups in society, including fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling class, maintain their dominance by securing the 'spontaneous consent' of subordinate groups, including the working class, through the negotiated construction of a political and ideological consensus which incorporates both dominant and dominated groups." (Strinati, 1995: 165) • (source http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm#hege )

Hegemony: control by consent E.g. popular fiction—Rebecca or 瓊瑤 • Bromley -- Rebecca  political hegemony -- “wants to show how popular fiction operates to secure consent to the political beliefs and interests of a ruling minority by offering narratives and characters whose desires and concerns are naturalized and legitimated by the text.” • 瓊瑤’s novel in the 70’s– coffee shop as a place of danger and wantonness; lower-class female protagonist causing her man to rebell against his upper-class family (esp. father). (e.g.《心有千千結》《一簾幽夢》《我是一片雲》[1976] )

Gramsci– hegemony not secure • not given to the dominant group, but "has to be won, reproduced, sustained." Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range... so that the subordinate groups either controlled or contained within an ideological space. . . (13; Norton 2455)

Hegemony: examples –images of the Blacks • Winning spontaneous consent through granting of superficial 'concessions' (Strinati,1995:167 qtd Mystry). This involves the dominant group making 'compromises' that are (or appear as) favourable to the dominated group, but that which actually do nothing to disrupt the hegemony of the dominators.

black images • I. Three stereotypes: Mammy, slaves, clown spontaneous consensus to their slavery or inferiority. • II. Positive images based on normative white ideals • Images in late 80’s: e.g. • --the middle-class household of The Cosby Show points out that there is 'nothing black' about the Huxtable's lifestyle (Mercer 1989:6 qtd in Mystry).

e.g. Cry Freedom; The Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves Counter Hegemonic Practices: e.g. Hip Hop. Strategies of containment Sympathy shown for the minorities, but with the whites as the real heroes.

Subculture • “Hegemony: the moving equilibrium” • Subculture as counter-hegemony— • alienation from the mainstream culture; • “subversion to normalcy” with styles. Subculture: the meaning of style (Dick Hebdige 15~) • e.g. punk • e.g. Taiwan’s underground band五月天 subsumed and contained by the mainstream

Conclusion • Literary theories as a box of tools? Yes and no—or more precisely, different sets of questions. • old and new historicism -- how to write history  how to historicize a text, even that of fantasies? • discourse– knowledge and power  discourse of Orientalism (supported by scientific studies, missionary books and travelogues) • ideology – interpellation; imaginary relations vs real relations –don’t forget the sugar-coating!!! • structure of feeling – emerging and lived • hegemony – naturalized thru’ consensus, struggling hegemonies

Next Time • 4-1 Obasan Chap 15-25 – each group- choose a passage to analyze its meanings and significance to the whole text. • Atonement (3/31 – LA 403 at 1:00)

Reference • Mistry, Reena. “Can Gramsci's theory of hegemony help us to understand the representation of ethnic minorities in western television and cinema?” < http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htm>. March 23, 2010. • Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments : Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-century American Literature . Chapel Hill U of North Carolina P, 2001.

Literature and History (3): From Text to Socio-Historical Contexts