Terry Eagleton

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Terry Eagleton

• Criticism and Ideology
• George Hsieh, 2002/12/3

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Categories for a Materialist Criticism

• General mode of Production (GMP)
• the dominant mode of a unity of certain forces
  and social relation of material production.
• Literary mode of Production (LMP)
• A unity of certain forces and social relations of
  literary production in a particular social
  formation.

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LMP

• Different or conflictual LMPs may coexist within
  a particular social formation.
• Ex. oral and written LMPs
• The internal complexity of LMP are constituted by
  production, distribution, exchange, and
  consumption, all of which will be function of its
  modes of articulation with other LMPs

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Relations of GMP and LMP

• the forces of production of the LMP are naturally
  provided by the GMP itself, of which the LMP is a
  particular substructure
• the relation between LMP and GMP are dialectical
  
• the social relations of the LMP are determined by
  the social relations of GMP
• the social relations of literary production which
  reproduce the social relations of general
  production is historically variable and
  determinate

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Categories for a Materialist Criticism

• General Ideology (GI)
• a dominant ideological formation produced by GMP.

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Relations of GI and LMP

• GI typically contains certain general elements
  or structures, which may at a particular
  historical stage bear significantly on the
  character of the LMP. Three general structures
  are linguistic, political, and the cultural
• A literary text is related to GI not only by how
  it deploys language but by the particular
  language it deploys

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Relations of GI and LMP

• Different LMPs may reproduce the same
  ideological formation. Conversely, the same LMP
  may reproduce mutually antagonistic ideological
  formations
• The direct control of GI on the literary text is
  censorship

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Categories for a Materialist Criticism

• Authorial Ideology (AuI)
• the effect of the authors specific mode of
  biographical insertion into GI. It is never to be
  treated in isolation from GI, but must be studied
  in its articulation with it
• It is not a simply matter to specify the
  historical period to which a writer belongs nor
  does a writer necessarily belong only to one
  history

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Categories for a Materialist Criticism

• Aesthetic Ideology (AI)
• a specific region of GI. AI is an internally
  complex formation, including a number of
  sub-sectors, of which the literary is one

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Relations of AI, GI, and LMP

• A GMP produces a GI which contributes to
  reproducing it it also produces a (dominant) LMP
  which in general reproduces and is reproduced by
  the GMP, but which also reproduces and is
  reproduced by the GI

GMP
GI
LMP
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Relations of AI, GI and LMP

• The ideology of LMP is itself encoded within AI
  it is the effect of a conjuncture between AI and
  GI.
• Reading is an ideological decipherment of an
  ideological product

LMP
GI
AI
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Relation of GI, AI and AuI

• Authorial ideology may be an important
  determinant of both the type of LMP and the
  aesthetic ideology within which an author works
• The relation between AuI and GI may be
  transformed by their mediation in terms of AI

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Categories for a Materialist Criticism

• Text
• the product of a specific overdetermined
  conjuncture of the elements or formations set out
  schematically above

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Towards a Science of the Text

• What is the literary text?
• The text is a production of ideology
• Ex. A dramatic production does not express,
  reflect or reproduce the dramatic text on
  which it is based
• The relation between text and production is a
  relation of labour

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Towards a Science of the Text

• in what sense is it correct to maintain that
  ideology, rather than history, is the object of
  the text?
• Ideology is not just the bad dream of the
  infrastructure (false consciousness). It is more
  like a mesh, which filters other real in order to
  present the real it carries.

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Towards a Science of the Text

• For what would it mean to claim that a text was
  directly related to its history?
• A text may speak of real history, but even if it
  maintains empirical historical accuracy this is
  always a fictive treatment
• History enters the text precisely as ideology,
  as a presence determined and distorted by its
  measurable absences

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Towards a Science of the Text

• What is the precise object of literary text? What
  doest the text denote?
• The literary text produces its own object, and
  presents itself as its own product.
• The texts means of production would include the
  aesthetic categories (genres, forms, conventions
  and so on).
• The texts product would encompass particular
  themes, plots, character, situations

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Towards a Science of the Text

• How does text concretize the abstract?
• The text strikes us with the arresting immediacy
  of a physical gesture which turns out to have no
  precise object because its fictiveness
• Fiction (text) does not trade in imaginary
  history as a way of presenting real history its
  history is imaginary because it negotiates a
  particular ideological experience of real history

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Towards a Science of the Text

• How does text become poetic?
• Fictiveness is a certain dominance of the
  signifying practiced over the signifiedso that
  as the signified becomes more abstract,
  putative or virtual, the signifying process is
  correspondingly thrown into certain relief. The
  poetic discourse is characterized by such a
  disturbance of the normative relation between
  signifier and the signified.

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Towards a Science of the Text

• To what precisely constitutes the literary works
  signified?
• The signified within the text is its
  pseudo-realthe imaginary situations which the
  text is about

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Towards a Science of the Text

• Criticism on Althusser
• Althussers view Art does not replace knowledge.
  What art makes us see is the ideology from which
  it is born, in which it bathes, from which it
  detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes
• Eagletons counterargument Ideology is not
  knowledge, it is not pure fantasy either

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Towards a Science of the Text

• Criticism on Althusser
• Althussers Consumer-centredness it is the
  reader who is the final guarantor of the validity
  of the text
• Eagletons view every text can be seen as a
  problem to which a solution is to be found
  and the process of the text is the process of
  problem solving

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Towards a Science of the text

• The tasks of criticism
• to examine the distortion-mechanism which produce
  that ruptured discourse, to reconstruct the
  work-process whereby the text suffers an internal
  displacement by virtue of its relations to its
  conditions of possibility
• its task is not to study the laws of ideological
  formations, but the laws of the production of
  ideological discourses as literature

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Animal Farm

• Regardless Orwells personal statement,
  nonetheless, Animal Farm is not Orwells
  political advocate, rather, it is a product of
  the anti-soviet ideology. Moreover, being
  determined by this ideology, a pseudo-reality is
  created in Animal Farm to present an anti-utopian
  ideology.

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Animal Farm

• GMP Economics recovering after WWII.
• GI Avoiding conflict to USSR, and concealing
  information related to her.
• LMP Censored by the British government
• AuI To reveal the evil side of Soviet gov.
• AI Journalismgtto reveal the truth, and claims
  for the freedom of the press.

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Animal Farm

• In relations to the anti-soviet ideology given by
  AI and AuI, the text acts against GMP, LMP, and
  GI.

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Animal Farm

• Real History
• Russian Revolution October 25, 1917.
• Antagonism between Trosky and Stalin.
• Economics transformation of USSR.
• German Invasion in WWII.
• Postwar arrangement.

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Animal Farm

• Pseudo-reality in Animal Farm
• Inversion of the chronological order of the
  events.
• Real history has been simplified.
• History enters as an ideology.

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Animal Farm

• Anti-utopian Ideology
• Power corrupts
• Seven Commandmentsgtsingle rule
• Oblivion of the glorious past.
• Reconciliation between men and pigs.
• Everything returns to the past.