9 - Literature, power, and the recovery of philosophical ethics

Summary

One of the striking features of contemporary literary theory, and indeed cultural studies more generally, is what might be termed its socio-politicisation of the ethical. Literary texts, traditionally viewed as repositories of moral and aesthetic insight or challenge, tend now to be seen as predominantly ideological constructions, or sites of power struggles between social forces of various kinds. Individuals and individual actions are treated as wholly explicable in terms of impersonal social forces locked in political confict. We are urged to see ourselves as ‘docile bodies’, and to view ‘creative’ literary output as simply evidential of impersonal social power struggles.

In what follows we will not directly concern ourselves with literature but with certain understandings of the social and political domains. Our aim is first of all to clarify the nature of social and political action and thereby to free it from some of the confusions to which its interpretation can be prone (this will be the primary task of Miller's section of the chapter) and second, to illustrate, in Coady's section, the complexities of ethical thinking about social and political realites by examining two relatively unexplored ‘moral situations’, those of compromise and extrication, each of which shows some of the ways in which moral reasoning and practical necessity can and should complement each other.

Socio-political action: a theoretical framework (Seumas Miller)

Much of the theoretical – as opposed to political – impetus for the process of the socio-politicisation of the ethical in the writings of literary and cultural theorists derives from two tendencies. Firstly, there is the tendency to operate with an insufficiently differentiated notion of social action.