Theorizing Opposition: Aristotle, Greimas, Jameson, and Said

Theorizing Opposition: Aristotle, Greimas, Jameson, and Said Robert Con Davis Nothing is truly one. —Aristotle Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. —Edward Said S INCE THE 1970s several American and continental critics have come to epitomize the possibilities for an “ oppositional” or radical critique of contemporary culture, from practices in the academy and arts to international politics. Most prominent are Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and some of the “ new” Marxists, particularly Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and Louis Althusser. To some degree most of the figures in this movement have used semiotics or language theory for probing the political dimension of culture. Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, e.g., uses A. J. Greimas’s “ semiotic square” as the key to a radical literary and cultural criticism.1 This political use of language theory has reshaped and vir­ tually redefined cultural criticism. But many on the political left, Barbara Foley and Catherine Gallagher, e.g., have questioned the particular blending of politics and criticism that has taken place—as Catherine Gallagher asked recently in Diacritics, whether the oppositional critics can properly “ derive politics from the nature of criticism itself.” 2She asks, in other words, does ideol­ ogy inhabit the very instruments by which we know the world? Gallagher and several other critics of oppositional criticism deny that ideology (politics) exists meaningfully at the level of “ critical” understanding, certainly not at the semiotic level. If they are right, if there is no intrinsic relationship between politics and the sign, then the “engaged” critic (like Jameson or Said) is merely dragging ideology in where it does not belong, merely importing politics as a rhetorical overlay to criticism and possibly, in the process, obscuring the “ real” questions of “ real” politics. On the other hand, as many Marxist critics (particularly Jameson and Baudrillard) now argue, the politics of the new cultural criticism, based Vol. XXVII, No. 2 5 L ’E sp r it C r é a t e u r largely in semiotics, is not a cosmetics of “ engaged” rhetoric but pre­ cisely ideology inscribed within language—the “ politics” that, in fact, can be derived from “ the nature of criticism itself.” Oppositional critics generally argue, moreover, that ideology, manifested in formal notions of “ opposition” and “ contrariety,” is never absent from language and is a political force at the deepest levels of semiosis, ideology being, as Baudrillard says, the “ very form that traverses both the production of signs and material production.”3 At stake here, as Gallagher, Said, Foucault, Chomsky, Paul Bove, and many concerned with oppositional criticism from different sides acknowledge, is the horizon of political change as seen within institutions such as literary studies and the academy. Here I will examine the theoretical implications of “ opposition” to argue that, as the new oppositional critics assert, “ ideology lies . . . in the internal logic of the sign” (Baudrillard, Critique 144). A radical cultural critique, it follows, must necessarily be a semiotic/political reading of cultural practices. We will see that underlying oppositional criticism is a set of assumptions about what conflict is, why some things are “ oppos­ able” and others are not, and, implicitly, what constitutes effective cultural criticism. I The tradition of thinking about opposition, from the Pre-Socratics and Aristotle through Hegel, Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Baudrillard tends to posit knowable rules that are thought to govern the possibilities for conflict and opposition in a given historical instance—hence the strong structuralist leaning in such theory. This broad approach from Aristotle through Jameson is frequently advanced as a four-stage analysis intended, in theory, to encompass and exhaust possibilities for the relations of conflict. A strong, recent example is Jameson’s use of A. J. Greimas’s “ semiotic square,” what Greimas calls the “ elementary structure of signification” that manifests the very “ conditions of exis­ tence” for “ semiotic objects” and extends to an analysis of “ the funda­ mental mode of existence of an individual or a society.”4Greimas sets up the square to analyze any social “ fact” within a four-term homology to the end of exposing its “ problematic,” or the ideological (and semiotic) frame that creates it, the alternatives it presupposes, etc. We can glimpse the political interpretation of the “ square...