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Notes toward a Theory of the Referent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Thomas E. Lewis
Thomas E. Lewis*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, Iowa City
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Abstract

Questions concerning textual referentiality figure among the most controversial in literary theory. The complementarity of semiotic and marxist notions of the literary referent suggests a new understanding of the referent based on the concept of “cultural unit.” The similarity in the relations that marxist epistemology (as defined by Althusser) posits between thought and the real and that semiotics (as defined by Eco) posits between language and the real warrants this reformulation. A discussion of the semiotic and marxist concepts necessary for a theory of the literary referent leads to its definition as a cultural ideological unit that, by virtue of its necessary but unrepresented relation to other, nonidentical cultural units, furnishes in the mode of a dialectical absence the materials requisite for an understanding both of certain textual properties and of the structure of the historical reality to which the text alludes.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 3 , May 1979 , pp. 459 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

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References

Notes

1 In this essay I break with the usual practice of capitalizing “marxist.” “Marxist,” especially for the reader unfamiliar with current marxist criticism, often imports the theological analogy. By writing the lowercase “m,” I intend to indicate the developing, open character of knowledge within the marxist tradition.

2 Those versed in semiotic and/or marxist theory will already have noted that my definitions of semiotics and Marxism originate, respectively, in the works of Umberto Eco and Louis Althusser. Indeed, any fruitful melding of these approaches naturally assumes that its components have already been elaborated within the individual theories themselves. Moreover, in this era of multinational capitalism, the preliminary articulation of theories that permit complementary use presupposes the already actualized necessity for Marxism to pay closer attention to the private dialectics of ideological superstructures and their informational formats, as well as for semiotics, if it wishes truly to become a cultural science, to recognize both the material determinants strategically situated at the methodological boundaries of its objects of study and the rapid changes in the semantic field as new social materials are incorporated.

3 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976). Parenthetical page references in the first section of my essay refer to this edition.

4 My thanks to Richard Terdiman of the University of California, San Diego, for this reading of Musset's Confession.

5 The distinction between the unknown “thing-initself” and the known “thing-for-us” is fundamental to Leninist thought. According to Lenin, the point of view informing this distinction is “materialistic, the recognition of the objective reality of the external world and of the laws of external nature, and of the fact that this world and these laws are fully knowable to man but can never be known to him with finality” (excerpted in Howard Selsam and Harry Martel, eds., Reader in Marxist Philosophy [New York: International Publishers, 1975], pp. 144–45). By thus applying the dialectical insights that our reality is precisely that which we know through cultural production and that this fact in no way obviates the material nature of a reality so defined, Lenin overcomes the false problem of the inaccessibility of an absolutely objectified reality.

6 The terms “reality effect” and “society effect” derive, respectively, from Barthes and Althusser. I am using the term “reality effect” in a much broader sense than that in which Barthes employs it in “L'Effet du réel” (Communications, 11 [1968], 84–85). Although his notion of the reality effect as a direct collusion between signifier and referent does figure in my essay, it appears in the much more sophisticated concept of ratio difficilis and hence as a modality of anterior referentiality. I employ the term “society effect” exactly as Althusser does in Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (1968; rpt. London: New Left Books. 1975), pp. 64–69.

7 See Richard Terdiman, The Dialectics of Isolation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), p. 7.

8 For an illuminating study of modernist fiction in the light of the concept of anterior referentiality see Jacques Leenhardt, Lecture politique du roman: “La Jalousie” d'Alain Robbe-Grillet (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973).

9 See James Howard Kavanagh, “Towards a Materialist Criticism: Explorations in Contemporary Critical Theory and Practice,” Diss. Univ. of California, San Diego, 1977, p. 24.

10 Reading Capital, pp. 34–43. Parenthetical page citations in the second section of my essay refer to this edition.

11 Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Okonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), p. 22. Translated and quoted in Althusser, p. 41.

12 For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (1965; rpt. New York: Random, 1970), p. 190.

13 Althusser does, of course, recognize that there exist certain strategic situations in which the ready appeal to practice as the proof of theoretical assertions is eminently justified: “I would point out that this kind of answer does have some effectivity, and that it should therefore be used when the aim is to defeat ideology on the terrain of ideology, i.e., when the aim is ideological struggle strictly speaking: for it is an ideological answer, one which is situated precisely on the opponent's ideological terrain. In major historical situations it has happened and may happen again that one is obliged or forced to fight on the terrain of the ideological opponent …” (Reading Capital, pp. 56–57).

14 Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Locke (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 137.

15 Althusser is often accused of theoreticism, a tendency that he has admitted and has recently sought to rectify, especially in regard to the criterion, just elaborated here, of the correctness of knowledge. Of course, it is true that the production of scientific knowledge involves the dialectical interaction of theory and practice (see Kavanagh, p. 61) and thus that the criterion of the system's degree of systematicity is insufficient as a jurisdiction by itself. Nevertheless, although Althusser unfortunately does not make this point clearly enough, his notion of open-ended scientific knowledge implies precisely the intervention of practice and the presence of cultural determination in the production of scientific knowledge.

16 Althusser. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 12786.

17 Edward Said, Beginnings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1975), p. 82.

18 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 72. Eagleton accepts and employs Althusser's definition of ideology throughout this work.

19 Althusser, “A Letter on Art to André Daspre,” Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 222–23.

20 Eagleton, p. 89. I must explain the context of this quotation. Eagleton is here summarizing a position taken by Pierre Macherey in Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: François Maspero, 1974). Eagleton does not wholly subscribe to this formulation and accuses it of formalism. I do, however, agree with Macherey and find that, while Eagleton repeatedly claims to disagree with both Macherey and Althusser on major points, he often uses their insights in a manner wholly consistent with their original formulations.

21 By “strict historicism” I mean that variety of historiography which Hayden White has called contextual 1st: “The informing presupposition of Contextualism is that events can be explained by being set within the ‘context’ of their occurrence. Why they occurred as they did is to be explained by the revelation of the specific relationships they bore to other events occurring in their circumambient historical space …” (Metahistory [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973], p. 18). While contextualism shares with marxist historiography (historical materialism) an interest in “the functional interrelationships” comprised in the configuration of historical forces at given moments, nevertheless contextualism refuses that gesture of conceptual abstraction without which no science can be constituted: “Insofar as it tacitly invokes rules of combination for determining the family characteristics of entities occupying finite provinces of historical occurrence, these rules are not construed as equivalent to the universal laws of cause and effect postulated by the Mechanist or the general teleological principles postulated by the Organicist. Rather, they are construed as actual relationships that are presupposed to have existed at specific times and places, the first, final, and material causes of which can never be known” (White, p. 18 [my emphasis]). Contextualism's epistemological stance here is determined by its limitation of the realm of historical signification to the parcels of history it isolates as periods and by its inability to recognize that individual cultural series do not always follow the same pace of historical development within given periods. Indeed, contextualism's final weakness resides in its failure to provide methodological space for diachrony: “Contextualist explanatory strategies incline more toward synchronic representations of segments or sections of the process, cuts made across the grain of time as it were. This tendency toward the structuralist or synchronic mode of representation is inherent in a Contextualist world hypothesis. And, if the historian who is inclined toward Contextualism would aggregate the various periods he has studied into a comprehensive view of the whole historical process, he must move outside the Contextualist framework ...” (White, p. 19). Thus, by so delimiting the field of meaning, contextualism inhibits a larger integration of historical data into a coherent conceptualization of the historical process itself. See also Althusser, “Marxism Is Not a Historicism,” Reading Capital, pp. 119–44, and “On the Materialist Dialectic,” For Marx, pp. 161–218.

22 I merely wish to remind us that all abstractions–all critical analyses and interpretations—are reductions. The charge against Marxism, that it is a reductive methodology, can be leveled at any critical methodology; it is usually directed against those disciplines (Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis) that embody the greatest explanatory power.