The "Production" of William Morris' News from Nowhere

84 the minnesota review Eileen Sypher The "Production" of William Morris' News from Nowhere Pierre Macherey's Pour une théorie de Ia production littéraire (1966; translated as A Theory of Literary Production, 1978) has offered the first substantially new contribution to marxist approaches to the novel since Lukács. Macherey's theory has been welcomed eagerly, if not widely , not only because its Althusserian-influenced method is conversant with post-structuralism but also because it defines the critical activity as explanatory rather than evaluative, that is, potentially prescriptive. For Macherey the critic's job is not to assess the worth of this or that text for developing revolutionary consciousness (as it is, say, for Lukács), but rather to make each text visible as a "production" from within a particular historical social formation. A marxist literary criticism has thus emerged which lays to rest, albeit sometimes uneasily, the spectre of aesthetic Stalinism.1 This welcoming of Macherey has already generated several important, generally in-house critiques, both of his work and of Althusser's comments on literature, suggesting the vital if problematic character of this methodology at the present time.2 The following discussion of William Morris' Newsfrom Nowhere contributes to this critical probing of Machereyan methodology. Certainly discussion of single literary texts is necessary in order to demonstrate the enormously rich textual work this theory enables. Macherey provides few readings of individual novels. Morris' text was chosen because utopia, and even genre itself, remain virtually unexplored from within this critical perspective. Macherey's few comments on genre in his chapter on Jules Verne invite development. Even more importantly , however, Morris' text is key because it focuses a problem in Macherey's and Althusser's embryonic theorization of "art." While this problem has been recently probed by Tony Bennett in Formalism and Marxism, here a brief review is in order. Althusser theorizes two types of social practices within any social formation: the "scientific " and the "ideological." Each has its institutional forms and its kinds of discourses. "Science," in James Kavanagh's summary, "is Althusserian theory's name for those forms of theoretical practice . . . that are particularly effective, in a way other forms of practice are not, specifically for the purposes of knowledge." Science shows us that what appears "real," "natural," while it has objective existence, always appears sypher 85 from within that body of knowledge which constructs it. Ideology, on the other hand, names those practices which "re-produce and readequate the subject's 'lived relation to the real.'" In ideology, the real appears "natural" (asocial) and contradiction, or any awareness of limits, is effaced. Ideology is unconscious of itself.3 While both practices are historically necessary for Althusser, marxist science in particular is privileged, since Althusser speaks from within that interpretation of Marx which celebrates rationality and consciousness as centrally necessary preconditions of the evolution of communism. While Althusser's/Macherey's distinction between ideology and science has itself been a subject of controversy, it is the problematic status of art within this scheme that is most pertinent to consider here. In both Althusser's and Macherey's embryonic formulations, "authentic" art hovers somewhere between ideology and science. Art is not science because its materials are all drawn from ideology—literature is concerned with people's lived relation to the real. Yet literature is "outside" of ideology in that it objectifies ideology. It provides an image of ideology such that the reader can '"see,' 'perceive' or 'feel' the reality of the ideology of that [represented] world."* Thereby art u'decentre[s]' the concept of the Absolute Subject . . ." and so "disruptfs] the 'imaginary' forms through which individuals' relationship to the conditions of their social existence is represented to them."5 Hence for Althusser/Macherey, literature is a valuable discourse—through not as valuable as science, or a scientific literary criticism, which gives us knowledge. Yet as Macherey in a later essay recognizes and as Bennett observes in his important critique of this concept of art, the aesthetic is thereby reified, turned into an "ideal force moulding the practices through which it eventually realizes itself in variant concrete forms."6 Rather, Bennett, drawing upon the recent work of Raymond...