Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (review)

136 the minnesota review politics, but in the non-political mode of traditional aesthetics. For Gluck, the break with cultural radicalism is the result of the "unstable and precarious" position in which Luka'cs found himself at the outbreak of the World War. Gluck treats Luka'cs' politicization rather peculiarly: rejecting Luka'cs' own estimate of its "necessary" quality, she characterizes his conversion as "impossible to trace with any detail or certainty." Gluck's modesty in the face of Luka'cs' certainty is admirable or irresponsible, depending on one's view of Luka'cs' own testimony; he seems clear enough as to how and why he became politicized. Class struggle became for him the seculiarized version of the formerly transcendental Utopia envisioned by the Sunday Circle. Luka'cs' 1918 essay, "Tactics and Ethics," in which he accepted the need for revolutionary violence to overthrow the bourgeois order, is the article of the "break"; from then on we leave the pre-Marxist Lukacs behind. Cultural emphasis gives way to political praxis, the place where the "authentic life" is now to be located. What characterized Lukács' later position, according to Gluck, is the retention of elements of the earlier rationalist and humanist dimensions of his thought, in contrast to the "fragmented" radicals of the younger generation. Perhaps the major service that Gluck has provided in this study is to remind us of the importance of these "old-fashioned" elements in the Marxist tradition, and in Luka'cs' work, in a period in which the left intelligentsia seem to have been all too successfully integrated into late capitalist reality. These two texts provide useful beginnings for any contemporary attempt to begin to think our way out of the "bad infinity" of the present moment. DANIEL O'CONNELL Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature by Colin MacCabe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. viii + 152 pp. $12.95 (paper); $27.50 (cloth). For Tracking the Signifier Colin MacCabe has gathered five essays written between 1974 and 1983, and appended an introduction titled "Class of '68: elements of an intellectual autobiography, 1967-81 ." The introduction relates the events of MacCabe's late undergraduate years at Cambridge, his important contribution to the rise and (alleged) fall of the film journal Screen, and his role in the infamous "Cambridge structuralist controversy" of 1980-81. MacCabe wisely does not attempt to demonstrate how these material events somehow determined the essays he produced in a given period. What remains is a fairly dry account of the institutional and intellectual contexts of the work and a heartfelt testament to MacCabe's unvarying political commitment. Readers hoping to be enlightened or entertained by his martyr 's-eye view of the Cambridge controversy will be sorely disappointed. Although nearly a third of the introduction recounts the history of that dreary affair, and while MacCabe succeeds all too wdl in communicating the bitterness involved, he refuses to go much beyond praising the wisdom and erudition of his supporters and pondering the motives of his always unnamed enemies. MacCabe is occasionally right on target—for instance when insisting that only the "professionally ignorant" could misinterpret his work as "structuralist" (6). Yet he is not above a certain pouting vengefulness: "In retrospect I can only suppose that the bitterness was engendered by the fact that if the traditionalists had won the votes they had lost all the arguments" (30). Only a reader with no previous knowledge of bureaucratic politicizing, or one with an inordinate interest in the history and structure of the Cambridge English faculty, will find this strangely reserved account at all illuminating. But if MacCabe's reluctance to name his Cambridge enemies can be generously interpreted as (ironic) professional restraint, his refusal to name himself at first seems positively spooky. MacCabe will offer rather harsh (and usually quite accurate) criticisms of "those who thought" or "the position that" when clearly he is addressing a position he took up in one of his essays. It is necessary to realize, however, that MacCabe is demonstrating here not irresponsible coyness but rather scrupulous subtlety. In the title to this introduction the Reviews 137 stress should fall not on "autobiography" but on the collective...