Macherey and Literary Analysis: An Introduction

montag 99 Warren Montag Macherey and Literary Analysis: An Introduction How may we explain Macherey's astonishing lack of influence on marxist literary studies in the U.S.? Although cited frequently by both Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson, Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production remains a dead letter, referred to from time to time but never finally worked on, corrected, confronted. But even dead letters make themselves felt, if only by their absence. In part, this lack can be explained by the fact that Eagleton and Jameson presented Macherey's work in a way that strangely annuled its possible effects. Both critics dismembered Macherey's theses with the aim of grafting certain parts onto an essentially foreign body: in the last instance, a theory of representation. The transplants did not "take," and for good reason: they were and are incompatible with any theory of representation . In Criticism and Ideology, Eagleton summarized (his reading of) Macherey's A Theory ofLiterary Production: "Macherey insists that the contradictions of the text are not to be grasped as the reflection of real historical contradictions ... for strictly speaking there can be no contradiction within ideology since its function is precisely to eradicate it. There can be contradiction only between ideology and what it occludes—history itself." The text is thus three times removed from its referent and, like the work of art in Plato's Republic, remains radically external to reality. Similarly, in The Political Unconscious, Jameson invokes Macherey to support the idea that history is present in the work only in the form of an absence, the recovery of which, through the procedures of a "marxist hermeneutic" will allow us to complete the work, to fill in its gaps. The work is then not so much the sign of an absence as of a distant presence which alone will tell us the meaning of (the work's) meanings. Macherey as presented by Eagleton and Jameson founders against the problem of the radical exteriority of the literary text to that which it signifies. The critical dilemma remains: how do we theorize the determination of works of art without succumbing either to a reduction that robs the work of its substance, or to a circular reasoning that posits the work as its own cause and as the guarantor of its own absolute freedom. If we refrain from further commentary on these notions and simply confront them with Macherey's central theses, we may see that he speaks from a fundamentally different place in the theoretical field. 1) The literary work is not opposed to or separate from historical reality. And how could 100 the minnesota review it be? What sort of existence might the work lead outside of reality, except an ideal, illusory one that is, properly speaking, no existence at all? 2) Internal to history, the work is a material product of the struggles that traverse the entire ideological field (which is itself the realization of these struggles). 3) Once we reject the idea of an immaterial existence which would allow us to reduce the work to something more real than itself or to declare it absolutely autonomous, causa sui, the text can be described as a "surface without depth" whose conflicts are displayed, whose overdetermined disorder breaks down all codes, systems or structures. The failure of criticism to grasp the materiality of literary works has made itself felt in the recent series of attacks on "post-modernism." Rather than analyzing the texts in question in order better to intervene in the struggles of which they are a part, some critics (Eagleton and Jameson among them) have reacted with denunciations which accept the very apocalyptic fantasies (e.g., the death of art) that the works themselves might allow us to analyze. As Macherey has argued, to denounce a work is to refuse its objective existence, its failure to conform to some ideal norm (e.g., Lukacs on modernism. Adorno on jazz). It is for this reason that Macherey's analysis of The Peasants, a selfproclaimed reactionary work, is of particular interest. We may grasp the significance of his analysis by measuring it against the interpretations of Lukacs (in "Balzac: The Peasants, "in Studies in...