Pierre Macherey and the Theory of Literary Production

134 MINNESOTA REVIEW TERRY EAGLETON PIERRE MACHEREY AND THE THEORY OF LITERARY PRODUCTION A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the "author as producer"—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between "base" and "superstructure" within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donne's Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practice the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerey to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel's form, it leaves the "Thackereyan ideology" essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary "superstructures" to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we aUow for disjunction and uneven development , it seems true that the "author as producer" concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as "organic form" which develops in late nineteenth century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the "three-decker" novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies. This is not the kind of question which the work of Pierre Macherey proposes to answer, despite the tide ofhis major work.1 Like Luka'cs and unlike Benjamin, Macherey moves almost wholly within the terrain of a work's "superstructures." "Production" refers not to the material apparatus, technological infrastructures, and social relations of an artefact, but to its self-production as a chain of significations. Yet if Macherey's work resembles that of EAGLETON 135 the neo-Hegelians in its dissolution of the text's materiality to a set ofmental significances, it resembles it in little else. Indeed the thrust of Macherey's project is nothing less than the liberation of Marxist criticism from every taint of Hegelianism and empiricism; and to say that amounts to saying that he is, effectively, the first Althusserian critic. His intention is to inaugurate a radical "epistemologica! break" with what has come before, to construct an entirely distinct problematic; and since he is therefore, in my view, one of the most challenging, genuinely innovatory of contemporary Marxist critics, the rest of this article wiU be mainly given over to an exposition of his as yet little publicized positions. Macherey begins with a bold application of Althusserian epistemology to critical enquiry. Criticism and its object-the literary text-are to be radicaUy distinguished: science is not the reduplication of an object but a form of knowledge of it which displaces it outside of itself, knows it as it cannot know itself. Criticism is not merely the elaboration of the text's self-knowledge : it establishes a decisive rupture between itself and the object, distancing itself from that object in order to produce a new knowledge of it. To know the text is not to listen to, and translate, a préexistent discourse: it is to produce a new discourse which "makes speak" the text's silences. Such an operation, however, is not to be misconceived as the hermeneutical recovery of a sense or structure hidden in the work, a sense which it possesses but conceals; it is rather to establish a new knowledge discontinuous with the work itself, disjunct from it as science is disjunct from ideology. Scientific criticism is in this sense the antagonist of empiricist critical "knowledge," which...