The Uncertainty of Analysis

Reiss, Timothy J.

Published by Cornell University Press

Reiss, Timothy J.
The Uncertainty of Analysis: Problems in Truth, Meaning, and Culture.
Cornell University Press, 2018.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/72582.

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 CHAPTER SIX

The Trouble with

Literary Criticism

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to
change it.
-Karl Marx, Theses un Feuerbach

1 am somewhat painfully conscious of disability ... [that being] the condition of

expression which is only adapted to discuss the received scheme of ideas on these
subjects.
-Victoria Lady Welby, Other Dimensiuns

Sartre's treatment of language and literature from the perspective of a

thought seeking (eventually) to embed them in the sociocultural en-
vironment was in sorne ways almost marginal to his more general politi-
cal, ethical, psychological, and epistemological concerns. 1 wish now to
discuss a pair of writers who, likewise situating themselves in a generally
'Marxist' context, try to understand literáture and language as funda-
mental within that environment. More precisely, 1 wish to discuss forms
of critica! work for which the social and political dimensions are essential.
lt seems evident that whatever problems there may be in this attempt will
be most urgent for writers within a Marxist tradition.
lndeed, a rather remarkable uneasiness pervades many such works
of avowedly Marxist literary criticism, as though the critic is conscious of
sorne vague guilt at dealing with superstructural artifacts while the real
work of transforming society goes on somewhere else: in the actual
"struggles of meo and women to free themselves from certain forms of
exploitation and oppression;· as Terry Eagleton (one of the most uncom-
fortable of these critics) has put it. 1 The first task of such criticism, there-
fore, has often seemed to be that of justifying or even excusing itself: by
arguing, for example, that literature provides an opening upon ideolo-
gies, u pon "the ideas, values and feelings by which meo [sic] experience
their societies at various times;· in ways and in specifiable areas that "are
available to us only in literature" (MLC, p. viii). The two books this chap-
1. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London, 1976), p. vii (hereafter cited
asMLC).

[179]
 180 The Uncertainty of Analysis

ter primarily considers present the reader with diametrically opposite

responses to this challenge, as do the two oeuvres, by and large, of which
they are a part. 2
In Eagleton's Criticism and Ideolog;y the 'shame' takes the form of an
apology for its "inadequacies," for its "inconclusiveness," for the "para-
sitie" nature of its participation in the international debate of which gen-
eral Marxist theory is composed. 3 It almost appears as though an
"adequate" criticism would at once be "conclusive" (the previous chapters
have already sufficiently queried that notion) and incorporated as pro-
duction rather than as a commentary upon such production (there, too,
earlier chapters have had their say). Clearly, at this point, Eagleton has not
yet worked himself away from an essentially positivistic criticism. 4
Such uneasiness, then, is doubly remarkable. In the first place, it pro-
ceeds transparently from a not altogether critica( acceptance of a base-
superstructure division, which means that one must in fact take a human
productive activity (literature, and even more, its criticism) to be quite
distinct from what are assumed to be the most 'basic' modes of human
production. Eagleton's Criticism and Ideolog;y sufficiently indicates the par-
adoxes into which such a division must lead-and they are 'liberal'
paradoxes before being taken over by a certain kind of Marxism: one of
them is immediately apparent in my first quotation, from Marxism and
Literary Criticism. The notion of humans "experiencing their societies"
runs the danger of suggesting a kind of passive reception by humans of
a history that is going on elsewhere, as though the reality of society in
sorne way pursued its development independently of those experiencing
it (we saw Sartre confronting this very peril). "Understanding," writes
Eagleton, "contributes to our liberation" (MLC, p. viii), but one is seriously
tempted to ask, "Liberation from what?" if active social forces are some-
how 'over there,' while we are 'over here.' In his Marxism and Literature,
Raymond Williams addresses this kind of problem at length and with
perspicacity. 5
The uneasiness is remarkable in the second place because it tends to
re-endow literary criticism with that very superiority which appeared

2. This essay was originally published as a long critical review. 1 have made no attempt
here to incorporate subsequent work by its two prolific subjects; the issues justifying its
inclusion are sufficiently indicated by the volumes discussed.
3. Terry Eagleton, Criticism arul ldeoiDgy: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London,
1976), p. 7 (henceforth cited as C/).
4. To sorne degree Eagleton has sought to escape this "positivism" in such work as
his Waller Benjamin, or Tuwards a Reuolutionary Criticism (London, 1981 ), but by and Iarge, his
subsequent writing-even his most recent and rather idiosyncratic book on Shakespeare-
has not really done so.
5. Raymond Williams, Marxism arul Literature (Oxford, 1977) (henceforth ML). This was
the problem Sartre spent a lifetime confronting (see, e.g., Chapter 5, n. 31, above, and
accompanying text).
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 181

to have been dispelled as a result of the base-superstructure division. The

kind of argument Eagleton proposes obviously concludes by simulta-
neously endowing both literature and its "scientific" analysis, supposedly
provided by criticism, with a kind of shamefaced privilege: "Literature,
one might argue, is the most revealing mode of experiential access to
ideology that we possess;' writes Eagleton (C/, p. 101), in an odd kind of
reification of literary texts, as though they provided an object of obser-
vation whose very reading could itself avoid what he means by "ideology:'
Quite evidently, he is repeating a familiar commonplace of our criticism,
differently expressed but identically felt, in the following assertion by
Jonathan Culler, in which the language and ideology are only seemingly
antithetical: "Though [literature] is dearly a form of communication, it is
cut off from the immediate pragmatic purposes which simplify other sign
situations. The potential complexity of signifying processes works freely
in literature. Moreover, the difficulty of saying precisely what is commu-
nicated is here accompanied by the fact that signification is indubitably
taking place.... Literature forces one to face the problem of the inde-
terminacy of meaning, which is a central if paradoxical property of semi-
otic systems."6 And for that exact reason, one may add, it cannot be
limited only to literature.
Culler's daim and Eagleton's are both versions of thoughts expressed
one hundred years earlier by Matthew Arnold and Hippolyte Taine, the
view of literature as the reflector and ennobler of nature and society. Or
they are T. S. Eliot's ideal of the "classic" as the lively memory of imperial
form borne clown to us across the ages by Augustan Virgil. These are all
but modernized versions of Alexander Pope's "nature still, but nature
methodiz'd" or of the more generalized Enlightenment concept of liter-
ature as the reflection and the bearer of society's real ethical knowledge:
seven versions, we might say, of Joseph Addison's notion of literature as
the "treasure-house" of knowledge for the wit, for the educated, leisured,
relatively wealthy purveyor of a dominant culture. 7 More reasons, no
doubt, for unease.
All of these strike one as parallel explications of a single phenomenon.
Referring to one type of discourse, they all express a particular, singular
understanding of what knowing is. They do so in ostensibly different
terms, but they refer unquestionably to the same dominant discursive
class, to a single practice of knowledge.

6. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Decunstructiun (lthaca, 1981 ),
p. 35. The matter is pursued at greater length in m y review of this volume and Culler's later
On Decunstructiun: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (lthaca, 1982): "On Exposition,"
Canadian Review ofComparative Literature, 12 (September 1985), 422-32.
7. All these issues are explored in m y Meaning of Literature.
 182 The Uncertainty of Analysis

Williams, once again, takes sharp aim at the kind of claim upon which
these assertions rely. In his earlier writings, up to and including his
admirable The Country and the City, 8 a similar uneasiness was to a degree
'exorcized' by autobiography: these writings were "deeply anchored in the
experience of an historical individual;' as Eagleton remarks (C/, p. 22),
though for the latter that tends to invalidate such writings as any exem-
plar of generalizable practice. Marxism and Literaiure deals at length with
the question of the base-superstructure division (and its concomitant "sci-
entific" privilege, both of which Williams correctly identifies as part of the
debris of a "bourgeois" dualism that Marx and Engels constantly sought
to jettison) and that of the subject's relation to sociohistorical process and
practice, to which relates the first of the paradoxes mentioned as prob-
lematic for Eagleton. 9 In this work, autobiography is no longer a forro of
exorcism or a way to avoid a perhaps more vital engagement with Marx-
ism; it has become a means of freeing Marxist criticism from a mechanical
dualism and from confusions directly due to attempts to escape that
dualism-by a mere complicating of the relationships between what con-
tinued to be seen as two fundamentally separate levels of activity.
Of The Country and the City, so sympathetic a criticas Evan Watkins was
able to remark that Williams had succeeded in transforming the kind of
ambivalence visible in a Georg Lukács, for example, and in proceeding
from an equivoca} acceptance of the dualistic model, by introducing a
third term enabling him to produce "a dialectical action involving three
distinct, though integrally related moments: the creative act of the indi-
vidual; the critica} and revolutionary awareness of the actual, shifting
social relationships through which that act comes into existence; and a
realization of a new forro of community made possible." 10 Whether or not
we find such a suggestion at all convincing in its detail strikes me as of less
interest than its obvious affinity with the kind of triadic process that
Peirce posited and that Chapter 3 has already tried to 'extend' toward
discursive criticism. The first "moment" advanced by Watkins is Peirce's
representamen (a "reaction" to actual, social relationships); the second is
his object (the 'referential' field to which the individual creative act reacts);
the third is his interpretant, produced from that exchange and ready to
become itself the representamen and/or object of subsequent triadic
process--or even, perhaps, a provisionally halted habit ("final interpret-
ant"): here, of course, a new social and cultural formation.
At the end of Marxism and LiteraJure, Williams makes Watkins's inter-
pretation (and to sorne degree, my further gloss) explicit:

8. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; rpt. St. Albans, 1975).
9. For the former, ML passim; for the latter, ML, pp. 128-35, 192-98, 206-12.
10. Evan Watkins, The Critical Act: Criticism and Community (New Haven, Conn., 1978),
p. 153.
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 183

Creative practice is thus of many kinds. It is airead y, and actively, our practica!
consciousness [consciousness as inherent in, produced from, and constantly
related with material activity and production]. When it becomes struggle-the
active struggle for new consciousness through new relationships that is
the ineradicable emphasis of the Marxist sense of self-creation-it can take
many forms. It can be the long and difficult remaking of an inherited (de-
termined) practica! consciousness: a process often described as development
but in practice a struggle at the roots of the mind-not casting off an ideol-
ogy, or learning phrases about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibres of
the self and in the hard practica! substance of effective and continuing rela-
tionships. It can be more evident practice: the reproduction and illustration
of hitherto excluded and subordinate models; the embodiment and perfor-
mance of known but excluded and subordinated experiences and relation-
ships; the articulation and formation of latent, momentary, and newly
possible consciousness.
Within real pressures and limits, such practice is always difficult and un-
even. It is the special function of theory, in exploring and defining the nature
and variation of practice, to develop a general consciousness within what is
repeatedly experienced as a special and often relatively isolated consciousness.
For creativity and social self-creation are both known and unknown events,
and it is still from grasping the known that the unknown-the next step, the
next work-is conceived. [ML, p. 212]

Wanting to express the same practice, Eagleton remarks that a Marxist

criticism, which "analyses literature in terms of the historical conditions
which produce it;' must at the same time "be aware of its own historical
conditions" (MLC, p. vi). The difficulty is that Marxism must needs see
such awareness as itself an ongoing production of what Williams calls
"practica} consciousness" and that it must therefore be inscribed in the
very production of the critical text. Historical materialism cannot simply
contain-as Eagleton asserts, using a recognizably Althusserian turn of
phrase-"a scientific theory of the genesis, structure and decline of ide-
ologies" (C/, p. 16), as though such "ideologies" were in sorne sense self-
contained and discrete objects, separated from the distanced and aper-
spectival science capable of understanding them (a matter to which 1
return in Chapter 9).
It is therefore distinctly revealing that Eagleton should criticize as a
fundamental misunderstanding Williams's rejection of the base-super-
structure equation on the grounds that it does not correspond to lived
experience: "No one, surely, ever took the base/superstructure distinction
to be a matter of experience." 11 The point is that orthodox Marxism acts as
11. CL, p. 22. Williams's rejection of the base-superstructure distinction to which Eagle-
ton is here referring can be found in his introduction to Frum Culture to Revolutiun, ed. Terry
Eagleton and Brian Wicker (London, 1968), p. 28. A more elaborate and nuanced presen-
tation of Williams's arguments on the matter is his "Base and Superstructure in Marxist
 184 The Uncertainty of Analysis

though it were. And a further point, surely, is that once the conceptual-
ization is available, it should in fact become a matter of experience. That it
does not and has not done so is evidence of an error in the analysis--one
that Marx tried to take into account, for example, in the rejected intro-
duction to the Grundrisse ( 1857) and the much earlier Ecmwmic and Political
Manuscripts of 1844 (from which Williams frequently quotes in Marxism
and Literature) and that Engels increasingly attempted to parry. 12 Eagle-
ton's weakness is that he strives to maintain division as foundational while
recognizing the paradoxes into which it perforce conducts him. That is
tantamount to ignoring the error. The reason such conceptualization
should, if 'correct' (that is, functionally, practically effective and pro-
ductive), become a matter of experience is that it would have become
an element of practical consciousness, which itself inheres in the material
activities of society. That is precisely what Williams's work has been
striving toward.
These introductory remarks indicate, therefore, that the fundamental
urge of Criticism and Ideology on the one hand is quite different from that
of Marxism and Literature on the other; indeed, the difference holds for the
total projects of their respective authors as evidenced in their published
work to date. Eagleton wants to show us what a Marxist literary criticism
is and how it should set about its "task": Criticism and Jdeology is essentially
prescriptive. Using a technique familiar to us from earlier works,
Williams's project in Marxism and Literature is first of all to situate Marxist
literary criticism both its own tradition and the broader Western tradition
within which Marxism distinguishes itself as a fundamental turning
point. 13 To do this, he begins with an analysis of sorne of the major
general concepts involved-"culture;' "language;' "literature,"
"ideology"-which are bro1,1ght into Marxism from the broader tradition.
From here he can advance toa review anda critique of many of Marx-
ism's essential concepts--"base and superstructure;' "determination;'

Cultural Theory," originally published in New Left Rroiew, no. 82 (November-December,

1973) and reprinted in his Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1980),
pp. 31-49.
12. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Ecorwmy (Rough Draft), tr.
Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, 1973), esp. pp. 109-11. The Ecorwmic and Political Manu-
scripts of 1844 are readily available in Karl Marx, Early Writings, tr. Rodney Livingstone and
Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth, 1975), pp. 279-400.
13. 1 think here of such writings as Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950
(London, 1958); The Long Revolution (London, 1961); Modern Tragedy (London, 1966);
Dramafrom 1bsen to Brecht (London, 1968); and The Country and the City. Since then, Williams
has broadened his field of inquiry to culture and society in a very wide sense, and has
become increasingly more theoretical-at the same time as he becomes increasingly familiar
as a novelist.
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 185

"productive forces," and so on-showing to what extent they break with

the tradition, to what extent they mark a radical production of emergent
elements and structures taken from the tradition, and to what extent they
remain caught within its hegemony. He can then go on to the second part
of his project, which is an effort to offer a radical alternative direction
within Marxism to the mechanistic models still very familiar both in
English-language and Continental Marxisms.
Emergent structures of practical consciousness, remarks Williams at
one point (contrasting them, following Antonio Gramsci, to the dominant
and the residual), depend on "finding new forms or adaptations of form"
(ML, p. 126). That is really what Marxism and Literature is all about, and
that is why its author combines an analysis of the central concepts as
constituted with an inquiry into the practical process of their establish-
ment (by examining the development of the terms used to embody them,
of the social developments accompanying them, of the conceptual contra-
dictions and the actual discussions to which they give rise, and so on).
Williams's project, therefore, is to provide a kind of exemplum of the cre-
ative process of which he speaks in the conduding remarks quoted above
(ML, p. 212).
The first difficulty for a Marxist criticism of the kind Eagleton seeks to
prescribe is that our culture has endowed literature certainly since the
second half of the seventeenth century (though Williams places it in
the eighteenth), with a privileged status that the orthodox (or any other)
Marxist cannot accept and remain intellectually honest-partly because
literature, both as object produced (for its author) andas object consumed
(for its reader) becomes simply another fetishized and alienated commod-
ity, partly because all superstructural systems ("environments," as Mikhail
Bakhtin has called them) must inherently be at the same level, and partly
because such privilege is the mark of literature as the (alienated) posses-
sion of the dass that owns the means of production.
Eagleton, of course, takes due note of this, both when he criticizes
Williams for not sufficiently acknowledging, in his Cullure and Society, the
fact that culture is itself an ideological term (which strikes me as an odd
commentary u pon a work that set out precisely to show the growth, mean-
ing, and implications of that concept between 1780 and 1950, though it is
the case that neither there nor indeed until Marxism and Literature did
Williams use the analysis to question his own critical project), and when he
remarks that what is "at stake" is the "ideological significance" of "Liter-
ature"-though he proceeds to define the last, in the traditional terms of
analytico-referential discourse, as "that process whereby certain historical
texts are severed from their social functions, defined as 'literary; bound
and ranked together to constitute a series of 'literary traditions' and in-
 186 The Uncertainty of Analysis

terrogated to yield a set of ideologically presupposed responses" (C/, p.

57). That particular definition is itself ideologically defined: there appear
to be few societies without "literature" of sorne kind, but there may well
be any number of different roles served by those literatures, depending on
their overall sociocultural environment. Our Enlightenment tended to
conceive of literature in the terms Eagleton uses to define it (whether
overtly, consciously, or not), but one should avoid even the hint that such
definition is at all generalizable.
Now while Eagleton does acknowledge the problem, he does not incor-
porate that acknowledgment in his own practice, as his constant and un-
defined use of the term "aesthetic" suggests. Because he accepts the basic
dualistic model, he reinscribes into his own project many of the same
presuppositions that underlie the bourgeois literary criticism whose sup-
port of "the dominant aesthetic and ideological formations" (however
contradictory) he starts by criticizing (C/, p. 13). That is, he reproduces
"in an altered form;' as Williams remarks of earlier Marxist views of
culture, "the separation of 'culture' from material social life, which had
been the dominant tendency in idealist cultural thought" (ML, p. 19).
The consequence of such a view is to miss "the concept of culture as a
constitutive social process."
Eagleton does not, therefore, pose any genuine question as regards
"literature." His initial project, he does assert, is aimed at its criticism: "to
pose the question of under what conditions, and for what ends, a literary
criticism comes about" (C/, p. 17). This is indeed a "branch" of criticism,
and the question is important. But posed in such a manner, it avoids its
own 'ground.' For it is not simply literary criticism but also literature that
"comes about." To be sure, it is not just a matter of "the existential fact of
the text" inasmuch as one can even conceive of such a notion, but neither
is it merely, as Eagleton asserts, that criticisms "produce the literary text as
their object, as the text for-criticism" (C/, p. 17). Clearly, it is that what one
means by literature far surpasses the arena of any technical criticism that
may seek to produce it and that is logically posterior to it. In fact, a pro-
fessional and semiprofessional criticism in the modernist sense of the
term emerged at the same time as did a particular concept of what literature
is and does. The first question should be put to that simultaneous emer-
gence-as it is by Williams. Eagleton, however, sees literature as a con-
stant process, sorne of which "needs" criticism, sorne of which does not
(Cl, p. 17).
That view makes for a serious ambiguity. If the material base is always
fundamental (see MLC, pp. 3-5; CI passim), then literature is at one level
in the superstructure, while its criticism belongs at another level. More-
over, such an idea also means that the superstructural system (or process)
of literature is in sorne sense permanent and independent of changing
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 187

material conditions, 14 while that of criticism is subject to varying "ideo-

logical" determinants, which do change as the base develops. Literary
criticism can thus be equated with the writing of history, with psychoanal-
ysis, with the study of political economy and of falling bodies and so on
(C/, pp. 17-18). Literature as the object of such criticism, however, has
then to be equated with the objects of history (societies and their develop-
ment, say), the objects of psychoanalysis (the human psyche and its func-
tioning), the objects of the natural sciences (nature and its laws).
Furthermore, the privilege of literature, toa great degree, has consisted
in its supposed ability itself to engage all those 'objects' in sorne way or
other (Addison's "treasure house").
This, with a certain number of complicating dauses, is the view Eagle-
ton adopts in practice. And yet it is dear that the 'objects' in question
(induding what we call "nature") become a part of practical consciousness
simultaneously with their study-not to mention that they become a part
of the material base in diverse ways, the most obvious of which is the
conception and production of experimental tools and instruments of tech-
nique. These in turn profoundly alter material social activity, both as
commodity to be produced and as means of production, and change
the practical consciousness thoroughly embedded in the whole process.
In the present instance the same could easily be shown to be true of
communication tools and techniques, induding the printed material com-
monly called literature.
Criticism, writes Eagleton, needs to be inserted into its ideological his-
tory. But so too does literature. 1 have argued elsewhere that "'Shake-
speare' is the outcome of the historical development of a dass of discourse
[a particular hegemony] as well as but before being a particular set of
texts written at a particular time and place, now available for
interpretation." 15 It is not simply, 1 repeat, that literary criticism "becomes
a crucial ideological instrument" (C/, p. 19); it is that literature does so as
well. 16 Actually, of course, this last statement is itself a dubious proposi-
tion (as Eagleton sometimes recognizes), for it has no genuine meaning
unless one has accepted the dualism already mentioned. Indeed, it is
not enough to note that literature is induded in the material base as a
particular mode of production, even if one endows it with its very
own acronym, "LMP" (e.g., C/, pp. 51-53). It is a visible form of prac-
tical consciousness that is incorporated through and through in material
practice.

14. This, of course, was a problem for Marx, expressed in the introduction to the Grun-
drisse, that Eagleton does not in the least resolve (MLC, pp. 10-13).
15. Timothy J. Reiss, ''The Environment of Literature and the 1mperatives of Criticism:
The End of a Discipline," Europa, 4, no. 1 (1981), 43.
16. Cf. ML, pp. 45-54.
 188 The Uncertainty of Analysis

The problem, that is, líes in the very notion of ideologies as superstruc-
tural, however complex (once again) their relations may be said to be. The
dualism such a notion sets up is inescapable. So too, apparently, is the
privilege thus produced: "The aesthetic is for a number of reasons a
peculiarly effective ideological medium [cf. ML, pp. 158--64]: it is graphic,
immediate and economical, working at instinctual and emotional depths
yet playing too on the very surfaces of perception, entwining itself with
the stuff of spontaneous experience and the roots of language and ges-
ture" (C/, p. 20). With regard to the discursive class dominant from the
seventeenth to the twentieth century, all this may be said to be "true." That
is why such loaded terms as "graphic," "immediate;' "economical;' "in-
stinctual and emotional depths," "surfaces of perception," "spontaneous
expression;' and "roots of language" appear unquestionably meaningful.
For us, Eagleton's intended readers, they are. But they are meaning-
ful because every one of these terms refers to a set of concepts developed
in and by the "neoclassical," "modernist;' "analytico-referential" model,
by the bourgeois hegemony, if you prefer: self and other, inside and
outside, depth and surface, nature (spontaneity, instinct, and emotion)
and culture (language and order), immediate and mediate. The dualism
on which they rest is readily apparent. They are precisely the elements
composing the concept and practice of possessive individualism, of the
control of the other, of culture as a particular kind of progress. 17 They
organize a "world view" depending upon a continuous expansion of a
domain controlled by the individual, by means of an activity at once spon-
taneous and ordered, taken as the common characteristic of humankind
(though within this culture the emphasis-and more-is always placed on
mankind) and organized by a rationality equally general, equally common,
always and everywhere the same. 18
Eagleton correctly remarks that the "aesthetic" for these reasons can
"proffer itself as ideologically innocent" (C/, p. 20), in spite of its being-in
ideology, for it does indeed correspond to a seemingly immediate human
experience. The trouble, of course, is that such "real experience" is itself
a part of the dominant ideology. What Eagleton thus fails to consider is
that that experience, to say nothing of the account rendered of it ("aes-
thetic" or other), is also very far from innocent. Contrary to what he
appears to assume, that account of human experience-and doubtless the
experience as well-grew with the growth of that literature (1 am not
suggesting that the one caused the other, in any simple sense, but that they
are a part of the ongoing process of what we recognize as "our" socio-

17. The reference here is to Crawford Brough Macpherson, The Political Theory of Pos-
sessive Jndividualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962).
18. Williams takes up these matters in ML; with respect to the "aesthetic," see esp.
pp. 151-57, 159--62.
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 189

cultural environment). For in the sense Eagleton ascribes to the term

"innocent," no experience can be conceived of that would be in any way
"pure" and "spontaneous." As Williams and others have correctly ob-
served, experience is practical consciousness, and that is always producing
and being produced within the material activity of society.l9
The various notions with which Eagleton here surrounds the "aesthetic"
seem to correspond to that level of "General Ideology (GI)" in which
literature (with "Aesthetic" and "Authorial Ideologies": "Al" and "Aul") is
to be situated; again the dangerous consequences of the division are only
too apparent. Clearly, literature and the aesthetic in general are conceived
of as in sorne way separate from the "real social form which provides
[their] material matrix." This form is the "ultimate signifier of literature, as
it is the ultimate signified" (C/, p. 72). Saying this, Eagleton finds himself
obliged to bring in a quite familiar notion of mediation, though he de-
scribes it as a mediation through, in, and of complex ideological forma-
tions, with "fiction" as "the term we would give to the fullest self-rendering
of ideology" (C/, p. 77). This attempt either to render the notion of
mediation more complex or to incorporate it somehow in the "forma-
tions" (and thereby to imply that it is not really a 'mediation' at all) is really
little more than a means of concealing the divisions that have been intro-
duced between the "material matrix;· "ideological formations;· "literary
text;' "Authorial Ideology;' "General Ideology," and the rest. Nor is it any
way out of them to assert, for example, that "Aul, then, is always GI as
lived, worked, and represented from a particular overdetermined stand-
point within it." (C/, p. 59).
Williams observes that the concept of "overdetermination" has been
introduced in order "to avoid the isolation of autonomous categories but at
the same time to emphasize relatively autonomous yet of course interac-
tive practices" (ML, p. 88). For such purposes, it is a more useful concept
than the more merely linear causal one of "determination" but can in turn
be readily "abstracted to a structure (symptom), which then, if in complex
ways, 'develops' (forms, holds, breaks down) by the laws of its internal
structural relations." It is just because Eagleton wishes to set in place
(necessary) "categories for a materialist criticism" (C/, pp. 44-63), 1 would
suggest, that he confronts just such a situation. Once again, Williams may
be given the last word: "Any categorical objectification of determined or
overdetermined structures is a repetition of the basic error of 'economism'
at a more serious level, since it now offers to subsume (at times with a

19. 1 think here of, e.g., Luden Goldmann's concept of "world view" (explored with what
still seems tome convindng assurance in his Le dieu caché of 1955), of Antonio Gramsd's
concept of "hegemony," or of Williams's own concept of "structures of feeling" as presented
in ML, pp. 128-35 (though 1 think the phrase may actually come from Goldmann).
 190 The Uncertainty of Analysis

certain arrogance) alllived, practical, and unevenly formed, and formative

experience" (ML, pp. 88-89).
That is what happens to Eagleton. It is why he finds himself forced to
repeat a variant of the concept of literature and the aesthetic as reflection,
representation, or reproduction of reality. Of course, he himself states
that this is a misconception, but to assert that "the text strikes us with the
immediacy of a physical gesture;' not providing us with the image of an
"actual state of affairs" but rather revealing "the nature of the environ-
ment which could motivate such behaviour" (C/, p. 75), is hardly to avoid
the mirror concept (however "fractured" and "fissured" the mirror may
be). The text, avers Eagleton, "destructures ideology ... in order to pro-
cess and recast it in aesthetic production" (C/, pp. 98-99). Literature, that
is, defamiliarizes ideology and makes it more "accessible" to consciousness.
At the same time, criticism will "show the text as it cannot know itself' (C/,
p. 43). For criticism too is essentially a matter of (distinctly privileged)
defamiliarization: "The function of criticism is to refuse the spontaneous
presence of the work-to den y that 'naturalness' in order to make its real
determinants appear" (C/, p. 101). Once again, after one has got past the
difference in language, how is this argument to be distinguished from
what we saw in Jonathan Culler, or from the claims made by T. S. Eliot or
F. R. Leavis? How dissimilar is it from Arnold, Taine, Pope, Addison,
Samuel Johnson, or even John Dryden, for the matter of that, who long
since spoke of the need to discriminate between the fundamental rules
governing allliterary texts and the superstructural determinants that vary
according to the specific cultural conditions in which a given work is
produced? 20
Indeed, Williams is able to show at length how these concepts are simply
repetitions, in a more 'radical' form, of the separations inherent in liberal
bourgeois concepts of knowledge and of the responses provided within
the world view they produced (ML, pp. 95-100, 191-92). For it is ulti-
mately an evasion to say of Joyce, for example, that the internal contra-
dictions of his art are "a productirm, not a reflection, of the ideological
formation into which Joyce as historical subject was ambivalently in-
serted-a production which, by putting that ideology to work, expresses
its framing limits" (C/, p. 155). One might fruitfully compare this claim
with Georg Lukács's comparison ofJoyce with Thomas Mano: the second,
says Lukács, expresses a "dynamic and developmental" view of the world,
to which a dialectic of individual and society, of intellect and praxis, is

20. The reference here is to The Grouruls of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), where Dryden
argues that the rules of tragedy should be copied from the Ancients, "those things only
excepted whicb religion, customs of countries, idioms of language, etc., have altered in the
superstructures": Selected Criticism, ed. James Kinsley and George Parfitt (Oxford, 1970),
p. 165. See, too, my Tragedy and Truth, pp. ~7.
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 191

fundamental, while the first echoes the "static and sensational" decaying
individualism of late "bourgeois capitalism." Or we might compare it with
Umberto Eco's very different but revealing exploration of Finnegans Wake,
in which that novel's techniques and intentions are interestingly linked
(and in considerable detail) with sorne implications of relativity theory.21
Such inquiries are more or less complex repetitions of what criticism in
our time has always done (and by "our time;' I mean the period since the
late seventeenth century). Nor are they very different from what Eagleton
is requiring-at least as regards their epistemological assumptions. For no
criticism ever maintained that art was apure reflection of anything; that
is precisely why criticism was "necessary" (a "need" Eagleton repeats: C/,
p.l7). And do we need reminding that modern criticism and modern
literature were coeval? Eagleton's argument about Joyce intends to show
how that author's work may be taken as exposing the limits of an ideology.
It does so because criticism slwws it to do so. Reflection at a double remove
still remains reflection.
For Eagleton as for so many of his predecessors, then, literary criticism
endures essentially as a form of truthful knowledge, able to abstract both
literature and itself from "ideological" determinants. Criticism is the scí-
ence that will reveal the hidden ideological and aesthetic determinants of
literature. In theory, criticism is also bound to and by these constraints; in
practice, its self-awareness releases it from them. To a considerable de-
gree, Eagleton has taken over Louis Althusser's concept of ideology as a
(false) system of "image and representation" (C/, p. 107; a matter on
which he congratulates Matthew Arnold!), and, like him, has opposed it to
"science" as the true system of knowledge, enabling in its turn a correct
social praxis.
Quite evidently, part of the difficulty here is that this concept of ideol-
ogy is itself the ideology of a particular "episteme." It is itself the mark of
a particular hegemony and scarcely helps one escape from it. Indeed, to
assert that ideologies are systems of representation, or even sets of poten-
tially affective mythologies that might come to permeate lived sociocul-
tural experience (C/, pp. 108-9), is to come close to affirming that
ideologies exist only within a hegemonic system in which the concept of
representation on the one hand and of concealed dominance on the other
are primary compositional elements. Awareness of this fundamental na-
ture of ideology would then allow the critic to assert its profound, if
complex, relationship with literature (not at all dissimilarly 'defined; after
all), and to assume that such distanced awareness makes the critic's own
practice in sorne way "innocent," denials to the contrary (C/, p. 17). In
21. Georg Lukács, "The Ideology of Modernism," in Realism in Our Time: Literature arul
the Class Struggk, tr. John and Necke Mander (New York, 1971), pp. 17-46; Umberto Eco,
opera aperta (Milan, 1962).
 192 The Uncertainty of Analysis

accepting the Althusserian division between ideology (concerned with

practice) and science (concerned with krwwledge), Eagleton is able mutely to
propose that a science of literary criticism (his, at least) can be
ideology-free. 22
Indeed, a further major dilemma confronted by Eagleton, and by a
significant part of Marxist literary criticism as a whole, is that in hoping to
break with "its ideological prehistory" (C/, p. 43), it acts as though it were
placing itself outside or beyond practice, as though it could innocently fill
in those 'boles' in the literary text that reveal the latter's relationship with
the various supposed levels of ideology and, through them, with the
modes of "real" production (C/, pp. 44-63). The function of criticism,
Eagleton writes therefore, "is to install itself in the very incompleteness
of the work in order to theorise it-to explain the ideological necessity of
those 'not-saids' which constitute the very principie of its identity (C/,
p. 89). Showing the text as it cannot know itself, making "its object ... the
unconsciousness of the work" (C/, p. 89), criticism makes the text into a
mirror of ideologies--or, more exactly, into a screen placed before them,
which is simply to reverse the metaphor. At the same time, it gives criticism
something to do: it has the task of silvering the screen so that it will tell
us something. Literature may be a privileged form of communication, but
criticism is both privileged and scientific: "It is not [the critic's] fault that he
has to be so arrogant," wrote l. A. Richards, "His claim to be heard as an
expert depends upon the truth of these assumptions." 23 Eagleton's theo-
retization aims to place literary criticism in the domain of science, 'across
from' ideology, as it were, just as ideology itself is 'across from' the
"material matrix."
The literary text is taken as a practice providing access to ideologies
because, as a practice, it is replete with their presence: a presence, we have
seen Eagleton insist, marked by absences in the text. The literary critical
text, therefore, is the science able to provide knowledge of the meaning of
those absences. It is small wonder that Eagleton is unable to define his
much-used term "aesthetic." Doubtless it indicates an absence in his own
text: in order to speak of literature as a privileged type of discourse (the
one providing us with "the most revealing mode of experiential access to

22. Louis Althusser's best-known writing on this subject is "ldéologie et appareils idé-
ologiques d'état (Notes pour une recherche)," in his Positiuns (1964-1975) (Paris, 1976), pp.
67-125. Actually, from Eagleton's point of view a more interesting and subtle distinction,
especially with regard to the literary (novel) text, is that suggested by Lukács between
narration and description, already latent in his early Theory of the Novel, tr. Anna Bostock
(Cambridge, Mass., 1971), and more specifically explored in Realism in Our Time. See, too,
"Art and Objective Truth," in Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and tr.
Arthur D. Kahn ( 1970; rpt. New York, 1971 ), pp. 25-60. The matter of the ideology/science
opposition receives further attention below in Chapter 9, esp. pp. 267-69.
23. Richards, Principks of Literary Criticism, p. 37.
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 193

ideology"), he is forced willy-nilly into practicing an essentially liberal

criticism, however ostensibly radical its form. In its own practice it ignores
the fact that like 'culture; the "aesthetic" is a category within a particular
hegemony.
Like others before him, therefore (1 think, for example, of Pierre
Macherey, Jeremy Hawthorn, or Herbert Marcuse), in his attempts to
achieve "rigorous" formulations and to avoid the "hypostatization" of the
diverse ideologies as sets related only extrinsically to one another (C/,
p. 54), Eagleton hypostatizes criticism itself: it becomes the 'scientific
meta-discourse' (furnishing, in Marcuse's case, a "social conscience"
for bourgeois capitalism) so beloved of a diversity of contemporary
positivisms.24 That is probably why, in his chapter concerned with the
practical analysis of literary texts (C/, pp. 102-61), he is determined to
show that the "major fiction," "the finest achievements of nineteenth-
century realism" in England (C/, p. 125)--the novels of Jane Austen, the
Brontes, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy-were pro-
duced just because those authors were "ambiguously placed within the
social formation." 25 Their art (and for analogous reasons, later that of
Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, D. H.
Lawrence, and W. B. Yeats) produced ideological conflicts in the text that
reveal their ambiguous situation in a developing and conflictual class sit-
uation. Their art corresponds, he argues, to "the historical self-division of
bourgeois society" (C/, p. 129).
The problem in that kind of assertion is that Eagleton has earlier (in his
first chapter) characterized literature generally by its internal absences and
contradictions, and it is hard not to see the one as a hypostatization of the
other. Has he not simply generalized a particular interpretation of
nineteenth-century fiction (the familiar "greats;• let it be noted in passing)
into a definition of the aesthetic as a whole? The answer appears to be yes.
When he comes, then, to the question of value (C/, pp. 162-87), he
suggests that the Marxist must inevitably view as the "greatest literature"
those texts that analysis shows to reveal the contradictions "between the
forces and social relations of material production" (C/, p. 175). Now while
it may be correct to view class society as essentially conflictual, that
particular contradiction marks a moment of very specific transformation:
that of a general change in modes of production. Eagleton seems to be

24. Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la productiun littéraire (Paris, 1966); jeremy Haw-
thom, Identity and Relatiunship: A Crmtriúutiun to Marxist Theory of Literary Criticism (London,
1973); Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimensiun: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Bos-
ton, 1978).
25. Once again, here, one might do well to think of Georg Lukács's analyses of Walter
Scott and Balzac: esp. for the former, see The Historical Novel, tr. Hannah and Stanley
Mitchell (London, 1962); for the latter, chapters in Studies in European Realism (New York,
1964).
 194 The Uncertainty of Analysis

inscribing it as a permanent condition of human societies and, simulta-

neously, as the characteristic of "major" literature. He has characterized
literature, that is to say, in terms of a particular hegemony, while dealing
with it as though it were a relatively invariant form of access to
ideologies-sometimes "needing" criticism, sometimes not (which would
of course be the case even if a notion of conflict were taken as broader
than that of a specific transformative moment).
Eagleton is certainly right in asserting a concept of value to be essential.
It is in any case unavoidable. As Evan Watkins has remarked: "character-
ization and evaluation are inseparable," and they refer in sorne way-
especially evaluation-to the extent to which the work produces a choice
and permits the clarification and development of social and personal te-
lationships. One might well prefer to Eagleton's idea of a value judgment
based on a rather static concept of class conflict the formulation proposed
by Watkins: "Genuine critical value judgments thus become reciprocal.
Justas Faulkner [in Absalum, Absalum!] canjudge Shreve only to the extent
that Shreve's creation is allowed to judge Faulkner in return, so it is that
the critic also allows the poem to judge him" (Watkins is referring here to
analyses ofhis own that precede the remark). 26 Eagleton's valuejudgment
becomes, rather, "great is the literary work that reveals class conflict": that
is to say, it is an essentially abstract evaluation of a work in terms of an
avowed tradition, not a practical judgment in terms of its role in present
practical consciousness. Eagleton's ')udgment" depends on a particular
hegemonic moment from which his whole argument would like to recoil
but seeks to escape in vain. Value, as Watkins and Williams have it, is a
matter of fruitfulness in moving "practical consciousness:' nota matter of
judging "major" and "minor" texts (in a style confirming Richards's dic-
tum about the critic's unavoidable arrogance). Eagleton does on one oc-
casion approach the former idea, in a phrase tending, however, to
contradict his own actual practice. A materialist aesthetics, he writes, must
grasp "form as the structure of ceaseless self-production, and so not as
'structure' but as 'structuration'" (C/, p. 184). As Watkins puts it, form
should be conceived as the dialectical "activity of mediation between per-
sonal and social."27
To sorne extent, Eagleton's book wants to respond to the 'mechanical
materialism' of much orthodox Marxist criticism, to a simplistic econo-
mism that views the economic base as entirely determining all other hu-
man activities and that tends to view it (theoretically) asan object, notan
activity. Eagleton himself makes this point by means of a reference to
Williams's objection to such an understanding (MLC, p. 54). In reply, he
26. Watkins, Critical Act, chap. 8, "Criticism and Community: On Literary Value,"
pp. 213-36; these quotations from pp. 213, 217.
27. Ibid., p. 185.
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 195

makes much use of such notions as "overdetermination" to indicate that

ideological processes are not in simple one-to-one relation with the base
and with each other; "historical materialism" to argue that the base is a
process, not an object; "mediation" to assert that the text is not a mere
"reflection" of an objectified base. These notions and arguments enable
him to introduce a rather more sophisticated version of what is essentially
the same conceptualization: the literary text does not reflect the real base
but allows us access to the ideologies that are in a highly mediated, over-
determined relation to that base. Williams has an easy time taking this
kind of attempt apart. He shows the very idea of separated and linearly
produced effects (and Eagleton's model, though Williams does nut refer
to it, remains fundamentally of such a kind, whatever complexities he may
have sought to introduce) to be a generalization of capitalist modes of
production. To take over such ideas in any form is therefore to repeat the
claims of "bourgeois" ideology (ML, 92-94).
That is no doubt why Eagleton is able to remark, apparently without
asking any fundamental question, that "even those only slightly ac-
quainted with Marxist criticism know that it calls on the writer to commit
his art to the cause of the proletariat" (MLC, p. 37). To be sure, his
reference is ironic, and he is rejecting simplistic versions of this view as
Stalinist, inevitably accompanied by the Proletkult excesses of Andrei
Zhdanov, the Soviet Writers Union, and socialist realism. Yet he merely
generalizes the same kind of appeal, referring the critica} "task" to "the
struggles of men and women to free themselves from certain forms of
exploitation and oppression" (MCL, p. vii). Indeed, the rarity with which
Eagleton avoids writing only in masculine terms might also give one pause
in this respect-not that revolutionary leftist politics is exactly renowned
for its gender awareness.
Eagleton's appeal to the people's struggle is doubtless a rousing call, but
it remains extremely vague, because the nature of the "oppression''
against which that struggle is supposed to be taking place remains de-
fined in terms similar to those which, in the Grurulrisse, provoked Marx's
comment that the pianomaker is a productive worker while the pianist is
not, "since his labour is not labour which reproduces capital" (Williams,
ML, p. 93).28 This is not simply a question of "updating" (Williams);
rather, the analysis of productive labor as work on raw materials to pro-
duce commodities to reproduce capital in point of fact reproduces cap-
italism's own analysis of itself. At the same time (and the remark is by no
means an irrelevance), that very analysis excludes from consideration the
vast majority of workers in advanced industrial countries and actually

28. The reference is to Marx, Grundrisse, p. 305.

 196 The Uncertainty of Analysis

helps the alignment of forces in such countries.29 No wonder that in the

area of literature and criticism we find it so very difficult to avoid repeat-
ing the tradition.
The remarks with which Lucien Goldmann began his talk at the Feb-
ruary 1969 Stockholm Conference on Czechoslovakia are apposite here:
"1 am rather afraid that, when we speak of contemporary economic events,
of social events, and particularly of political events, we temi to use ancient
categories which emerged in a world now in process of disappearing,
categories and words of which even the relative validity existed only within
such a world. This is true, not only for reactionary thought, but also, and
particularly so, for socialist and even for Marxist thought."3o One can of
course avoid the difficulty by speaking of "service industries," of the "en-
tertainment" or "culture" industry, of "professional unions" (to whose
thoroughgoing difference from industrial workers' unions anyone asso-
ciated with them can readily attest), or, as Goldmann himself does in the
textjust mentioned, of"self-management," of"specialist technicians," and
of "qualified workers" who replace the older type of industrial worker.
Then, too, one can call "proletariat" all those who do not own the means
of production. By such (metaphorical) means one can hope to apply a
nineteenth-century analysis of the conditions of early industrialism to the
advanced industrial nations of the late twentieth century-in which it is
quite clear, however, that the relation of owner to producer, of oppressor
to oppressed, and so forth, is utterly different. It is in this regard that
Williams, following Gramsci's lead and analysis, introduces the concept of
hegemony (ML, p. 111-14). A totally transformed materiality requires,
and already implies, a new hegemony. Such is our contemporary situation.
Eagleton (in MLC and implicitly in CI) adopts the now familiar criti-
cisms of "socialist realism" in order to observe that the struggle for 'the
liberation of the proletariat' is not thereby furthered. The question that
Western Marxists must ask themselves, however, is just this: "What is the
meaning of such a concept as 'freeing the proletariat from oppression?' "
When Marx and Engels undertook their analysis-and it was their
point-the industrial proletariat, especially in England, was in a clear
numerical majority, and its material and spiritual oppression by a power-
ful owning minority was equally clear. Under such circumstances a call for
the proletariat to free itself from that oppression was evidently meaning-
ful. It was indeed (and the reminder is surely unnecessary) just the lack of
29. Roger L. Taylor is one of the few to have pursued this kind of argument relentlessly
to its logical conclusion: that art is a bourgeois form of representation and that it works
against the interests of the masses (Art, an Enemy of the People [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.,
1978]). A similar impulse has led Roben Pattison to try to renew the concept of literacy in
his On Literacy: The Politics of the Word frum Humer to the Age of Rock (New York, 1982).
30. Lucien Goldmann, "Eppur si muove," in bis Power and Humanism, ed. and tr. Brian
Trench and Tom Wengraf (Nottingham, 1974), p. 39.
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 197

such circumstances that made them argue the impossibility of socialist

revolution in Russia, for example.
That situation no longer exists; in the West it is obvious that the indus-
trial proletariat (that was) now has access to material and spiritual
wealth---even, to sorne extent, access to the means of production-to a
degree undreamed of in the nineteenth century. In its class relationships
the Soviet Union now finds itself approximately in the situation of the
industrial West sorne fifty or more years ago; the signs are perhaps to be
perceived in intellectual protest and ethnic unrest. The signs of the
present situation in the West are to be seen, for example, in the fact that
all the ridings of a 'working-class' area such as Birmingham can vote
massively for a fundamentally reactionary conservative government, or,
more recently, in the complete collapse of the so-called "Democratic alli-
ance" in the United States and the resulting blue-collar vote not only in
favor of Ronald Reagan but on behalf of a Republican Senate. 3 t
None of this, I need hardly say, is to argue that the internal conflicts
have been resolved, with the comforting effect of evacuating the question
of social and political conflict. It is to say that emergent structures of
feeling are slowly consolidating themselves and that a new analysis of the
social facts implied by and brought with them has become imperative. It
is to say that the internal conflicts of Western nations in the twentieth
century are not those of nineteenth-century Britain, France, Germany, or
India. The great risk of accepting uncritically the Marxist analysis of
social conditions is that one may thereby ignore a more urgent peril.
One may suggest that insofar as the Marxist analysis is correct in its
detail, it applies today to the relation between the industrialized nations
and the Third World, though no doubt "correct;' here, is the wrong word
for "applicable." What I am arguing, therefore, is not that we can rid
ourselves of our social conflicts by exporting those conflicts to "them" (as
was effectively done under imperialism and colonialism) but that it is
simply inappropriate to seek to apply the Marxist analysis uncritically to
31. The reference is to the election of the first Thatcher government in the 1978 British
elections, and to the overwhelming defeat of Jimmy Carter in the U.S. elections two years
later. Since then, Margaret Thatcher's reelection in 1983, Ronald Reagan's unprecedented
sweep in 1984, Helmut Kohl's andjacques Chirac's elections all seem to confirm the point
being made here. Though one can obviously not entirely elide local conditions, these events
do offer evidence of retrenchment and an inability to escape old habitual and familiar
schemes of thought and action. Indeed, one has an overwhelming impression of a general
fear before the un familiar and a despair of dealing with it. The all too familiar consequence
is a retreat to self-interest and defense. This has been recently manifested in the serious
erosion of freedom of expression in both England and the U.S., first in the Law Lords'
decision to forbid reporting all media discussion about Peter Wright's Spycalcher (with its
"revelation" of collusion between M.l.5 and the Tory Party to overthrow the then Labor
government), and second in the almost simultaneous ruling by the FCC (both occurred in
July 1987) todo away with the fairness doctrine of equal media time (made possible by a
prior presidential veto of a congressional attempt to make the doctrine legally binding).
 198 The Uncertainty of Analysis

the internal relations of modero industrialism, even though such an ap-

plication appears satisfying to many would-be 'revolutionaries.' Indeed,
their inability to do anything about the situation thus analyzed needs
explaining, as does the fact that supposedly revolutionary attempts are
infallibly recuperated by the discourse of order (see, obviously, Chapter
4). Why were the potentially insurrectionary events of 1968 merely sub-
sumed under the continuing Leviathan?
I may propose that it is at least partly because the analysis in question is
precisely (as I have already remarked) industrialism's analysis of itself,
which is why nothing new can be produced from it. The analysis follows
the logic of the discourse of order (I will not try to make this generaliza-
tion more specific here, though earlier and subsequent chapters provide
it with meaning). What is essential, therefore, is nota retrospective anal-
ysis of this kind but a prospective one-though by definition any analysis
must make use of predetermining elements in order, for example, to
distinguish the residual from the emergent. In their time, a prospective
analysis is just what historical and dialectical materialism were.
The principal and most obviously perilous dilemma of the present and
immediate future lies less simply within the industrialized nations (be-
tween an industrial proletariat andan industrial ruling class), or between
the industrialized West and the industrialized 'communist' nations, than it
does between advanced capitalism and the more primitive capitalism of
the Third World. That is the locus of the first urgent task needing res-
olution. But mere 'resolution' is not enough, for the unavoidable danger
under the present circumstances is that 'resolution' of that conflict can only
reinstall worldwide more of the same, can only confirm the hegemony to
which Marx and Engels were airead y addressing themselves. That is to say,
while the Marxist analysis may well be applicable in detail only to Indu-
strialismtrhird World relations, to deal only with that and no more is to
risk replaying in a different dimension the history of the past century.
For to perform such an analysis, though absolutely necessary, is also
simply to transport industrial capitalism's self-analysis to a new level, that
of externa! (as opposed to internal) sociopolitical and economic relations.
It is not for nothing that the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan pictured
the State as one man made up of many humans (Sartre's group as indi-
vidual). Hobbes's authoritarian Leviathan, Montesquieu's liberal monar-
chy with its mediating legislator as the interpreter of universal law,
Rousseau's general will, Hegel's Idea of the State were all (different)
transferences of individualism to the level of relations between states (I
have elsewhere suggested that all may be called versions of "authoritarian
liberalism"). Bacon argued that war was the sport of nations: it strength-
ened the sinews of their "bodies;' kept them in good health and always
prepared for the constant struggle characteristic of relations between
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 199

states. Hugo Grotius's arguments concerning war and peace served to

justify an always adversarial and conflictual relationship between nations.
Hobbes was to view the contract as a means of overcoming the continuous
state of conflict--characteristic of the "state of nature"-between individ-
uals, but that state of conflict remained essential to the relations between
nations, as Bacon and Grotius had already assumed.
lndeed, one could almost say that if the violence between individuals
became on the one hand the covert violence of relations of production as
far as the internal conditions of a given society were concerned (theoret-
ically both justified and concealed by John Locke's arguments concerning
the 'equality' of property rights-though not of actual ownership, of
course), on the other it could remain overt by being both subsumed under
and 'sublimated into' the external conflictual relations of an individual
state in its external struggles with equally individualized rivals. This is
hardly the place for a thoroughgoing analysis. 3 2 The important point 1
wish to make is that the kind of relationship of which 1 am speaking is
clearly built into the analytico-referential discursive class in its application
to and practice in the political and economic domains. An analysis must
indeed be undertaken in its terms but always accompanied by the aware-
ness that such an analysis will not provide the way out of the difficulty. It
will inevitably reveal the detail of a historical repetition, albeit in a new

32. Sorne aspects of such an analysis have been explored in rny Discourse of Modemism, are
further cornrnented on in this volume, and are a longer-terrn goal of current research. My
repeated use of the phrase "authoritarian liberalisrn" is intended in all seriousness to indi-
cate the kind of political authority hegernonous in the West since the late seventeenth
century, however superficially diverse its forrns. lt goes back no doubt to Antiquity, but its
rnodern appearance is due to two things: the perception of a real Europe-wide political and
social crisis throughout the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century (see, e.g., Chapter 4,
pp. 143--44), and a theoretical cornbination of concepts of natural rights and state sover-
eignty, whose details were gradually elaborated during those two centuries. Both Machiavelli
and Jean Bodin (arnong rnany others) thought of civil society as forged frorn an earlier
condition of violent conflict and as requiring a strong centralized sovereign authority. This
view was shared, with variants, by such as Thornas Hooker and Bacon, Cardin Le Bret and
Richelieu, Giovanni Botero and Hugo Grotius, rnany of whorn were at the sarne úrne
evolving a theory of individualist natural rights. The strands carne together in Hobbes (see,
e.g., Chapter4, pp. 147-48, and Chapter 5, pp. 171-72) and in Locke (though Spinozaand
Leibniz would not have dissented unduly). Hobbes's view of civil society as created by every
individual's ceding of its natural power to a single sovereign authority was constituúve. The
authority was "liberal" because it was then held to guarantee to all the individuals (in theory)
the continued enjoyrnent of such natural rights as did not absolutely irnpede those of others.
Nor did it rnatter whether the sovereign was an individual (Hobbes), sorne collective ern-
bodirnent of a "general will" (Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau), or the state itself (Hegel). The
underlying structure of power relations was in each case the sarne: it assurned that individ-
uals were sornehow free but subordinate and subject to a collective control whose forrn
rnaintained their libenies. At the end of the seventeenth century, a prorninant English
statesrnan, the rnarquess of Halifax, could thus surn up the rnatter in his "Anatorny of an
Equivalent": "There can be no governrnent without a Suprerne Power; that power is not
always in the sarne hands, it is in different shapes and dresses, but still, wherever it is lodged,
it rnust be unlirnited .... Where this Suprerne Power is rnixed, or divided, the shape only
 200 The Uncertainty of Analysis

dimension. lt will reveal just why such a condition can produce nothing
new. lt will serve to show limits.
New forms of discourse, new forms of conceptualization, become
essential. Their development cannot come from any individual fiat, but
they may proceed from an initial recognition of limits and of the bank-
ruptcy of certain kinds of action. Literature is part of what was the dom-
inant discourse of three and a half centuries (at least); it was established
as such. As currently conceived it can be considered only part of an ob-
solescent hegemony. To call for the elaboration of what 1 refer to as a new
"discourse" (by which 1 mean a hegemony concerning all forms of mean-
ingful social process) is not to deny that such a discourse must make use
of emergent forms, of elements present in analytico-referential discourse.
Raymond Williams makes the timely reminder that to take heed of this
"aesthetic" and of "literature" as categories produced out of the eigh-
teenth century should not result in facile dismissal, for both categories
contain "elements which cannot be surrendered, either to historical reac-
tion orto a confused projective generalization" (ML, p. 145).
That is assuredly the case. It is also the case, however, that we could not
dismiss them if we wanted to; they are a part of what Williams calls our
"structures of feeling" (ML, pp. 128-35), whose "presence" is not merely
a theoretical but a practical fact. The question must arise, however, as to
how far emergent elements of such structures (and by "elements" 1 do not

differeth, the argument is still the same." And yet the ultimate purpose of such govern-
mental authority, he insisted, was to take care of the "rights inherent in men's persons in
their single capacities." That sovereignty, he had written in his slightly earlier "Character of
a Trimmer," must further "all kind of right which may remain in the body of the People,"
protect "the common good of mankind," and uphold those individual liberties which are
"the foundation of all virtue," that liberty which, as he unsurprisingly described it, "is the
mistress of mankind," for which (for whom?) every man's "reasonable desire ... ought not
to be restrained" (George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, Cumplete Works, ed J. P. Kenyon
[Harmondsworth, 1969], pp. 135, 59--62). Sartre, we have seen, substantially echoed such a
view. So too had Kant, who conceived of individual and society as in a conflict brought under
control only by sociallaws whose irresistible force ordered individual freedoms: in his view,
these laws were in fact embedded in the mind as the "categorical imperative" of social duty
(see, e.g., Chapter 7, pp. 236-38). In Freud's later psychoanalytic system, the superego
performed a similar role. The phrase "authoritarian liberalism" enables one to see the links
between what might otherwise be thought of as quite different political systems. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty's 1947 "defense" of Stalinism may help reveal the underlying similarity of
assumptiori; see H1111Wnism and Terror: An Essay un the Cummunist Problem, tr. John O'Neill
(Boston, 1969). One might call Merleau-Ponty's defense "fundamentalist," for its argument
rests (precisely) on the party's need to uphold the rights of the many to the detriment of
those of a few, whose freedoms (it was claimed) would impede the rights of the majority
absolutely. And one would do well to consider the implications of readings of Rousseau's
political thought that go from revolutionary liberalism to totalitarianism. My point is
that analytico-referential political discourse (authoritarian liberalism) runs, but controls,
that whole gamut. The late seventeenth century, it would seem, had already glimpsed that
inclusiveness.
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 201

mean to imply discontinuities) can be grasped meaningfully in their pres-

entness without their necessarily being objectified. The determination of a
radical break is therefore not to be seen as a practical fact but rather as
a matter of practice. It makes use of emergent forms, but its impulse is to
break with the practical hegemony. It must emphasize the break simply
because an emphasis on the elements already present within the hege-
mony tends, as an objective fact, to lead straight back into it. That is
Williams's point regarding "orthodox" Marxist criticism as a whole, and
mine concerning Eagleton's argument in particular.
In sorne sense, Williams's Marxism and Literature may be understood as
offering a complete critique of the kind of position taken by a writer such
as Eagleton. So there is a particular poignancy, a special irony in the
latter's remark: "It is a curious feature of Williams's intellectual career
that, working by his own devious, eclectic and idiosyncratic route, he has
consistently pre-empted important theoretical developments" (C/, p. 35).
The publication of this plaintive comment in 1976 appeared to forecast
the "almost wholly theoretical" book (ML, p. 6) that Raymond Williams,
his teacher, published just a year later. And in that book, Williams began
by setting forth, in his familiar historical style, both the novelty and the
limitations of those early Marxist analyses that were to become the ortho-
doxy of later generations, limitations still entirely applicable to an attempt
such as Eagleton's.
One further example will suffice, just because it concerns the key con-
cept of culture (and, with it, of the aesthetic and the literary). Williams
remarks upon Marxism's analysis of "civil society" as a specific historical
form: "bourgeois society as created by the capitalist mode of production"
(ML, p. 18). Such an analysis implied the view that the enabling concepts
of civil society were the marks of what Michel Foucault called a particular
episteme (a term 1 think we may now equate, at sorne level, with hegemuny).
Williams adds, however, that that analysis "was still largely constrained
within the assumptions which had produced the concept [of 'civil society'
and, within it, of 'civilization']: that of a progressive secular development,
most obviously; but also that of a broadly linear development"-for the
Marxist analysis, from feudalism to capitalism to socialism, each at first
progressive and each except the last reactionary in its late stages (ML, p.
18). He notes, too, that Marxism's rejection of "idealist historiography"
(which saw history as the rational "overcoming of ignorance and super-
stition") and its indusion of "materialist history" as an emphasis on " 'man
making himself' through producing his own means of life" were entirely
new. But again he adds that the stress laid upon material history and
the "discovery of the 'scientific laws' of society" led to the separation of the
cultural from the material and toan emphasis on the "secondary, 'super-
structural' " status of culture: "Thus the full possibilities of the concept of
 202 The Uncertainty of Analysis

culture as a constitutive social process, creating specific and different

'ways of life,' which could have been remarkably deepened by the emphasis
on a material social process, were for a long time missed, and were often
in practice superseded by an abstracting unilinear universalism" (ML, pp.
18-19). Williamsjustly remarks that this situation still exists (ML, p. 20).
1 have been arguing that a powerful statement such as Terry Eagleton's is
forceful evidence of it and, for precisely that reason, requires refutation.
One can observe in many writings of Marx and Engels, particularly in
sorne of the latter's late remarks on or about literature, just the view
Williams is here urging. Indeed, Eagleton quotes a letter from Engels to
Joseph Bloch of September 21, 1890:

According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element

in history is ultimatel:y the production and reproduction in reallife. More than
this neither Marx nor 1 have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this
into the statement that the economic element is the unl:y determining one, he
transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic
situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure-political
forms of the class struggle and its consequences, constitutions established by
the victorious class after a successful battle, etc.-forms of law-and then
even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants:
political, legal, and philosophical theories, religious ideas and their further
development into systems of dogma-also exercise their influence upon the
course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in deter-
mining their form. [MLC, p. 9]

It was essentially Leninism, and the extension of sorne of its yet more
reductive elements by Stalinism, that put an end to that kind of expan-
siveness. The political requirements of a specific moment and national
context demanded that linearity and hierarchical concepts be emphasized:
both from the top down (the party as intellect and head of the national
revolution) and from the bottom up (change in material production as the
basis of the revolutionary process). That required the subordination
of every other kind of worker in the first case, and of every other kind of
production in the second. That Western Marxists have failed, until ex-
t~mely recently (if even now), to see such a view as the necessary partic-
ular consequences of a specific col1iuncture and preferred to generalize it
(with an equally reductive reaction as one of its frequent consequences)
was no doubt partly the result of the wishful thinking that followed the
Bolshevik revolution's success, and partly the result of the fact that such
assumptions were indeed but a variant of the hegemonic concepts of
advanced capitalism (as Williams observes). While opposing the implica-
tions of that capitalism at one level, Western Marxists did not actually
contradict them or it, nor did they imply any fundamental questioning of
 The Trouble with Literary Criticism 203

its a prioris. It is just that that explains why Soviet Leninist-Stalinism has
led to forros of state capitalism and imperialism that certain parts of the
Third World aptly characterize as similar to those of advanced Western
industrialism.
Eagleton's argument, expelling all "expansiveness" as "non-Marxist,
revisionist, neo-Hegelian, or bourgeois," tends to place him in the camp
of a restrictive and reductionist Marxist criticism. The comment is
Williams's, regarding the views expressed by an earlier English Marxist
criticism (ML, p. 3), but it could well be interpreted as a response to
Eagleton's comments on Williams himself (CI, pp. 21-42). Raymond
Williams's desire is to turn the more expansive arguments of Marxism
toward a production of the emergent.