Modern literary theory

STEPHEN HEATH

Modern literary theory*

To provide an introduction to modern literary theory is in itself not an easy task, given the range and complexity of what might be included under that heading. It is less easy still in Cambridge, where the literary faculties have been generally concerned to preserve their particular combination of traditional forms of literary history with versions of reading ‘the words on the page’ in an often intense hostility to theory. The controversy over ‘structuralism’ (used as the preferred shorthand for ‘modern literary theory’) was a rather aggressive expression of resistance, articulated - when it achieved articulateness - in terms of ‘principles not theory’ (dedication to principles in ‘a grounded choice’ as against literary theory defined by its abstraction, its systematisation, precisely its anti-literariness) and of true respect for the canon (‘it is our job to teach and uphold the canon of English literature’). A much-favoured quotation at the time was from T.S. Eliot: ‘to theorise demands vast ingenuity, and to avoid theorising demands vast honesty’.

As that at once suggests, there is a moral of literature at stake, an issue as to rightness of reading and response. ‘We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotions and nothing else’, wrote D. H. Lawrence. Where then is the room for theory, which can only be a falsification, an alienation of the literary experience? ‘We were empirical and opportunist in spirit’, commented F.R. Leavis, for whom of course Lawrence was a central reference, looking back over his and his colleagues’s work in Scrutiny, the journal that came so centrally to define literature and its criticism and its teaching in Britain. The point is the refusal of theory, philosophy, system, and this refusal is given as determined by and as a recognition of literature, the particularlity of the literary, precisely the literary experience. What is crucial is to grasp ’the force of poetry’, a phrase of Samuel Johnson’s (‘all the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment and animates matter’) that is taken up by Leavis to become an expression for him of genuine apprkciation (‘the nature and force of the Shakespearean “medium” ’ ) and that passes to Christopher Ricks at the heart of the ‘structuralist’ controversy (a collection of his essays is then called The Force of Poetry). Critical principles must resist literary theory in the interests of the proper perception of literature, practical criticism versus theoretical system.

* Lecture given in the Modem and Medieval Languages Faculty, Cambridge as introduction to that Faculty’s newly instituted course, ‘Modern Literary Theory’, October 1988.

36 Critical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2

It is somewhat ironic in this connection that some of what is comprised in modern literary theory can itself be seen as, to stay for a moment within such terms of distinction, pro-literary and anti-theory. Derrida, indeed, entitled one of his earliest published essays ‘Force et signification‘ and has developed his own recognition of the force of the literary, with deconstruction proposed as exactly not a theory, a philosophy, a system. When Leavis stresses that the reading demanded by poetry is of a different kind from that demanded by philosophy, it would not be difficult to derive a similar stress from Derrida’s work too, which work is very much a practice of close reading. Simply (not so simply), ‘force’ now runs differently into realisation of ‘a certain pure and infinite equivocality leaving no respite, no rest to the signified meaning, engaging it in its own economy, to make a sign again and to differ’. Derrida’s ‘force’ grasps a ‘generalised textuality’ in the ceaseless productive movement of which any meanings, positions, identities are given (’grounded principles’ included) : there is no outside-text, ‘iln’yapus d’hors-texte’. Which does not mean that everything is language but that language is always everywhere already, nor that there is no reference but that reference is always immanent, from (within) textuality, writing, differmce (Derrida’s word for the ceaseless productive differentiating movement), that there is no other foundation of reference to the world (which is thus not ‘outside’ language, with the very opposition of inside/outside necessarily wavering); reference is unsecured by any presence, origin, whatever; on the contrary, it creates presence, projects origin (so Derrida will talk of ‘the original absence of the thing or referent‘). What Derrida propbses as deconstruction is the paradoxical practical knowledge of this, knowledge in reading, with the terms of that reading fully literary: an attention to language, rhetoric, figure, trope, to the text (‘textuality as such’, in the words of Rodolphe GaschC, one of Denida’s commentators), the reinscription of the text - the work as text - in the matter of its writing, in the excess of the grounds it gives itself, the hierarchies it assumes, the identities it proposes. It is then not just that literature demands a reading different from that of philosophy but also that philosophy, as anything else, demands it too, demands a literary - a textual - reading. Derrida has been concerned with Plato and Hegel as well as with MallarmC and Joyce.

It is not just by chance, the mere chance of an example, that this introduction to modern literary theory has moved quickly into mention of Denida and deconstruction. Deconstruction, in fact, has become somewhat synonymous with modern literary theory (when ‘structuralism’ was used in the Cambridge controversy, it was deconstruction at which it usually seemed to be intending its stab), largely due to its academic success, notably in the United States. That success depends to a great extent on the way in

Modem literary theory 37

which deconstruction’s attention to the textual has given literary studies and their practitioners a newly defined thing of their own, a specific and powerful perception and practice: specific because of the emphasis on textuality, on literary reading, on ’the careful teasing out of the warring forces of signification within the text’, as critic Barbara - not Samuel - Johnson aptly puts it; powerful because of the way in which it has a hold not just on literature but on all orders of discourse, all systems of representation: the productions of philosophy or sociology or history or . . . fall equally to its reading; deconstruction as the (non-) theory of theories.

Paul de Man provides an account of the status of the ‘rhetorical readings’ of deconstruction for literary studies in his essay ‘The Resistance to Theory’: ’They are theory and not theory at the same time, the universal theory of the impossibility of theory. To the extent however that they are theory, that is to say teachable, generalisable and highly responsive to systematisation, rhetorical readings, like the other kinds, still avoid and resist the reading they advocate. Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance.’ One consequence of this is that theory, in Geoffrey Hartman’s words, is ‘just another text’: any proposed gap between theory and object is collapsed by deconstruction in its very response to and demonstration of textuality. Thus Derrida once declared his work to be a footnote to Finnegans Wake and has been increasingly concerned with ’writing in another way, so as not only to have a theoretical analysis . . . but to have another practice in writing’. This theory is resistance to theory, the undermining of theory through that attention to the rhetoric of its elaboration, to all the evasions and equivocations and erasures by which it makes its assumptions and stands its grounds. And it is resistance to theory too in the sense to which de Man’s account also points: self-resistance, resisting, inasmuch as it becomes theory, the necessary textualisation of itself, falling, like other readings, into the assurance - the textual blindness - of a system. All of which brings us back to the power and the specificity: deconstruction has this overall force and its force is that of literature, the ‘literary’ as recognition and practice of textuality, Finnegans Wake’s ‘the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever’.

If ‘the force of poetry’ takes us from Leavis and Ricks to Derrida and the Yale critics, it does so, of course, at the expense of what the former would see as the very moral identity of literature, the identity guaranteed through such notions as ‘canon’, ‘tradition’, ‘English’, and brought out in their style of principled criticism (their critical evaluations can differ - witness the contrasting accounts they give of, say, Tennyson’s ‘Tears, idle tears’ - but Ricks represents the etiolated possibility of Leavis’s version of literature and its criticism today: cultural substance, with the loss of the social mission

38 C r i t i d Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2

of English, now emptied into the ever clever turns of ‘personally pondered’ insight in moralising stasis). The questioning of literature in these terms of identity is effected equally by other of the bodies of work that make up what is understood as modern literary theory. Thus Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism stresses ‘the primacy of the signifier’ and the constitution of the subject in the symbolic, looks to the ‘letter’ of a text and seeks to grasp the impossible attempt that literature is to master the movement of unconscious desire. At the same time as which, typical in this of these other bodies of work, it separates itself from deconstruction inasmuch as it accepts at least some theoretical distance (the gap between theory and object), a particular relation of knowledge (Lacanianism has a truth, a determination of meaning: sexual difference as the crucial articulation of the constitutive division of the subject in the symbolic, enacting the splitting of subjectivity itself, the phallus as the term - the signifier - of this articulation- enactment, the castration complex). It proposes a specific theoretical understanding, however complex, however close to the excessive experience of the unconscious, however difficulty transmissible as system, where Derrida’s deconstruction aims at the radical unsettling of the positions, the truth, of any system, indeed at the confidence of any positionality, and so neither theory norcriticism: as Denida insisted in an interview in 1977 (‘Ja, ou le faux bond’): ‘Deconstruction is not a critical operation. The critical is its object; the deconstruction always bears, at one moment or another, on the confidence invested in the critical or critical- theoretical process.’

Evidently, there can be no possibility of, nor utility in, here rehearsing the range of theories comprised in modern literary theory (Terry Eagleton has done this with great skill in his book Litermy Theory) but, with the current influence of deconstruction in mind, one or two issues may be broached.

One such is that of the academic success of deconstruction and of modem literary theory more generally. The question can be posed as to what the economic and social conditions of this are: who produces literary theory, for whom, in what conditions? One approach to an answer can be made by thinking of the academicisation of intellectual life and of the crisis as to the function of criticism. Leavis, as already suggested, had a coherent sub- stantive moral version of literature (grasped and defended as ‘the great tradition’) and a central function for criticism as education (the maintenance of the social-cultural value of that literature, a training in its standards, how to read literary -critically as crucial embodiment of ‘the common pursuit of true judgement’); with these at the same time more and more defensive (minority culture in the face of mass civilisation) and more and more ineffectual (hence the strident impasses - Cambridge lambasted for


complicity with that civilisation and its environing philistinism and simultaneously clung to as last-hope centre of cultural salvation). With the shifting reality of culture in the post-war world (for example, the cultural saturation of the social with signs and messages through the development of the media) and the shifting reality of education (for example, the expansion of student numbers in the 1960s and the social-political pressures of that expansion and the kinds of diversification it brings), literature and literary studies come under challenge for the impotence of the criticism they promote in relation to the social formation, for the contradictions between their asserted values and their academic commodification, for their routine reproduction of themselves, for their social assumptions and conventions of judgement and knowledge. On the one hand, this led to renewal of critical theories of the given literature (the canon), often removing it from consensual coherence and refinding it in, say, the expression of class determinations (so many immediately political accounts); on the other, to production of literary theory as intellectual substance for the weakened literary studies, as for instance with the development of a technicist structuralist poetics (so many ‘new approaches’, hard matter to strengthen enfeebled criticism]; and then on a third hand, if that be allowed, to concern exactly with procedures and knowledge, typically epistemological - what does it mean to interpret a text? - and typically sceptical - the success of deconstruction. With this last hand, epistemological insecurity arrives as expression of academic marginalisation, which can then be revalued (the margin is the supreme site of truth and value, the critical edge of rhetorical readings] or playfully accepted (the margin is the very site of literature and theory itself is just another text, so the theorist or critic has the status of writer, demonstrating language, makmg literature). The extreme twist here is that of de Man who carries deconstruction along in the wake of literature as ‘being the truly political mode of discourse’ - by virtue, that is, of its undermining of grounds, its refusal of position.

It is always useful, following through into another of the issues that can here be briefly raised, to consider literary theory in terms of the works it privileges, the specific literature from which it draws its crucial demonstra- tions, on which it gives its crucial readings. Deconstruction operates theoretically over all texts, is in Derrida’s practice wide-ranging within ‘Western metaphysics’, has been used to approach many different literary works. At the same time, there has been in its development in literary theory a particular privileging of Romantic texts, from Romantic poetry through such nineteenth-century work as that of Nietzsche or MallarmC, to the writings of a self-reflexive modernism and beyond. When the Yale decon- structionists got together for a joint volume to be called Deconstruction


and Criticism, they did not choose as focus for their discussion The Taming of the Shrew or The Hind and the Panther or Hard Times; they picked Shelley’s The Thumph of Life.

Romanticism here is the essence of literature, the force of a will to unity that knows in its figures, the tropes of its expression, all the impossibility of the wholeness it intends. Consciousness in its reality as language seeks an identity that language in its reality cannot give other than as, precisely, an image that says also the real lack, gap, break, non-coincidence (and for instance, of matter and consciousness). Hence the drama of identity, of subjectivity, of the attempt at unity that Romanticism is, that can be read in its texts, their impasses, this as their supreme value, the ‘blindness and insight’ they enact for our reading. Which is the substance of the history into modernism with its radical experience of language as problem, at once in its question of how to put an end to language, to ground it in the presence - the presentation - of things (Pound looking to the Chinese written character as ‘a medium for poetry’, not ‘juggling mental counters’, ‘watch- ing things work out their fate’, but then also, for example, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus who refers to hieroglyphic script in order to understand ‘the essential nature of a proposition’ and seeks in the detail of his account of the latter as ‘a picture of reality’ at least to ground the meaning of some language) and in its increasing experience of the determining reality of language, its material expression and exploration of the impossibility of any end (Joyce and his ‘comedy of letters’, Finnegms Wake as theatricalisation of language, ‘scribenery’, but then also Freud with his ’other scene’ of meaning beyond the subject-conscious, but then also Saussure with his description of language as productive system of differences, ‘only differences’, and the textual frenzy of his work on anagram in Latin poetry, but then also the Wittgenstein who moves from the ‘bewitchment’ of the Tractatus to the language games of his later work). Language becomes general problematic, a - the? - twentieth-century paradigm, with modern literary theory - structuralist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, etc. - caught up in its questions and deconstruction as its supreme articulation. No literary theory today can avoid this problematic, but what is then a problem is the movement from language-consciousness to language-play to the statement and restatement of interminability, the powerlessness of a knowledge - which is the knowledge of literature and its theory and criticism - that is always the knowledge that ’no degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words’ (as de M m put it in his contribution to the Deconstruction and Criticism volume).

‘They think they have got rid of capitalism but they have only got rid of grammar’, wrote Brecht , thinking in the 1930s of some language-conscious


modernist writers. Which is not to be taken as a dismissal of work on language, attention there (for Brecht, after all, radical questioning of the very terms of representation was essential for any consequential realism of the kind he was intent on producing) but which is an indication of the need to negotiate such consciousness with social reality, indeed with the social reality of language itself, and to grasp literature in that negotiation and in that reality of language. Modern literary theory, its various theories, can be, should be, looked at from that decisive perspective of use.

When language becomes a general problematic in this way, providing the general impetus to and for literary theory, the generalisation runs the risk of a reduction to language as some kind of identity of field or material or topic, albeit, say, labelled ‘Western metaphysics’. The label ‘Western’, that is, can serve only too well as a gesture at recognition of the limits of the generalisation that then allows nevertheless, provides the alibi for, con- tinuation of work in disregard of anything but the same, the universal of this history, this literature, this language (‘Western’ is simply not enough). The development of class and race and gender struggles has pushed against assured and institutionally protected unities such as ‘literature’, ‘language’, ‘culture’, ‘English’ and so on, and the struggles need to be taken over to literary theory, the latter grasped from them; which is where the effective question of literature and theory as ‘truly politically mode of discourse’ is likely to be posed and answered.

It is significant in this respect that we hear little in modern literary theory these days of ideology, so little so that it is tempting sometimes to see that as one of the very requirements of a modern theory: reference to ideology become old-fashioned, a concept of yesteryear . . . Symptomatically, any such reference is absent from many of the currently most successful books of literary theory: Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction has no entry for ‘ideology’ in its index; Tori1 Moi’s Sexuul/Textual Politics, even, has just two, neither of which refers to any developed discussion. If everything is sign, everything construction of meaning, everything fiction, as is quickly said, then ideology seems to lose any particular sense, any particular relevance, any necessity: we enter the age of fictions, of the end of truth (henceforth to appear, if at all, only in quotation marks, bristling with warning), the era of postmodern circulation. Explaining postmodemism to children (it is the title of his book, written as a series of letters to this or that child, Le Postmodeme explique u r n enfants), Jean-Francois Lyotard makes no mention of ideology, now replaced by ‘billions of little and less little stories’, ‘the weft of everyday life’, a ‘complexification’ that renders analysis in terms of ideology crude and simplistic; there is no place for ‘simplifying slogans’ and the best, politically, is ’a minimal resistance to


all totalitarianisms’. New pragmatist and Derridean linkman Richard Rorty does the same the other way round: in a world of stories, we need not a discourse of emancipation but of tolerance, a swapping of stories, conversation; pragmatics then offered as ‘a non-ideological reformism’. What is in question, of course, is not the desirability of tolerance, story-swapping, conversation (who would not want these?), but their deployment as against, in opposition to, any discourse of emancipation, the politics of that. For Rorty as for Lyotard the judgement of stories is really not political (hence the removal of ideology as necessary concept) but is made rather, as it were, in the mode of the ‘less dangerous’ (where the political is the dangerous, a recasting of singularity into project, idea, truth without the warning quotation marks]. Which is where we catch up again with literature and literary theory, the ‘knowledge‘ of textuality, as only truly political mode of discourse, a discourse - a writing - undoing all positions, ideologies, ‘mystifications’, withdrawal from the politics of meanings into the ceaseless displacement of any meaning . . . and of politics.

If we shift the context, the environment of theory (involving who it is written for, the sense of its production, the nature of its use), things look very different. A work of literary theory such as Emmanuel Ngara’s Art and ldeologyin the African Novel could not, as the title tells us, exist without ideology as operative concept and as political reality, point of and for its intervention. Nor could the novels he deals with, Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood, Ngiigi’s Petals of Blood, La Guma’s In the Fog of the Season’s End, Gordimer’s The Late Bourgeois World, and so on; not that they are mono- lithically tendentious, ‘merely ideological’, but simply that ideological struggle is fundamental to their reality, to their literary work. The truth of representation and the construction, elaboration of that truth are indeed what is at stake, but politically at stake, and theory and criticism and writing are bound up with the complex understanding of that. Which points again to the degree to which modem literary theory in its current academic success depends on disconnection from any effective account of the political and of the political relations of literature, as witness exactly its anachronisation of ideology, and on the theorisation of that disconnection as value, truth indeed, the truth of the literary. This last word on the political, the only truly political mode of discourse, is also the last word we are likely to hear of the political, written out of its danger.

De Man, again in his‘The Resistance to Theory’: ‘Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit.’ But this itself is a form of defensive resistance to criticism, the latter reduced to and so dismissed as mere

Modern literary theory 43

statement of fear, that requires above all attention to its ideological mystifications (a requirement not the less urgent for the recent discovery of de Man’s involvement in pro-German journalism in occupied Belgium in the early 1940s and for the questions posed as to the relations between the subsequently developed literary theory and oblivion to social - historical reality). What is Ngara’s book from the standpoint of modern literary theory? Backward? Still mystlfyingly involved in the old terms? That modem theory ‘upsets the established canon of literary works’, comments de Man, who writes on . . . Wordsworth, Shelley, Yeats, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, Holderlin, Proust. Where are Ngara’s authors in this? The point is not mechanically to substitute Ousmane, say, for Proust in some new canon but to focus the claims and the impasses of the theory (it is the absence of Ousmane that is significant). How do we read Proust today, when ‘today’ includes Ousmane?

Upsetting the canon here is, in fact, the valuation of ‘literariness’, a valuation which can thus ironically renew quite traditional versions of literary autonomy (this renewal a major factor in the academic success of this theory). We have been taught after all to read literature literarily: its politics (should such an idea appear) sui generis and deconstructionism carries a heavy appeal to this. The force of literature is its textual equivocality, its figuring of language: ‘indeterminacy of address’ (Derrida), fore- grounding of ‘the rhetorical or tropological dimension of language’ (de Man), ‘words standing out as words’ (Hartman). Literature is the reverse of ideology; the purpose of, say, a poem such as Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is the complex literary reading, the poetic experience, it engages. Ngfigi, however, records his disappointment and anger when he finds his son being taught just this Wordsworth poem and that reading in a Kenyan school: ‘The truth is that the content of our syllabi, the approach to and the presentation of literature, the persons and the machinery for determining the choice of texts and their interpretation, were all an integral part of imperialism, and they are today a part of the same imperialism but now in its neo-colonial phase’ (‘Literature and Society’, in his Writers and Politics).

How do we think and theorise literature in use, as use? And this without eradicating the range of simultaneous possibilities, without collapsing analysis into some identification of some fixed function? Alongside Ngfigi’s account of the school poem, we need also, that is, to put Audre Lorde’s memory of her childhood encounter with Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ in a Harlem library, an encounter that became part of the reason of her own writing: ’I used to recite that poem to myself all the time. It was one of my favorites. And if you’d asked me, “What is it about?” I don’t think I could


have told you. But this was the first reason for my own writing, my need to say things 1 couldn’t say otherwise when I couldn’t find other poems to serve’ (Sister Outsider). To bring back ideology into the discussion, into the theory, is not to dissolve literature into it, any more than it is to ignore the critical possibilities of rhetorical readings: the point is to take up textuality, literariness, into the social definitions of its specification, elaboration and use, that complexity.

Looked at indeed itself in use and in the use it gives literature, deconstruc- tionist literary theory may be contradictory in its effects, its possibilities. Thus deconstruction has been developed in certain radical ways in feminist thinking as too in the analysis of colonialism, the tropes of its discursive realisations. The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been notably influential in its specific bringing of both of these together into newly political, critical, symptomatic readings that intervene to display and displace and deauthorise colonial and phallogocentric discourses and their joins and interdependencies. Thus, at the same time, deconstruction has been developed in certain ways in the name of textuality, the non-ground of the movement of differance, as in opposition to what is then identified by Derrida as ‘reactive feminism’, which needs to be prevented from dangerously ‘occupying the entire terrain’ and foreclosing the multiplicity of sexually marked voices, the desire for ‘a choreographic text with polysexual signatures’; a development in which ‘reactive feminism’ can come to sound very much like women’s movement and struggle in reaction (precisely) against oppression and ’polysexual signatures’ like an erasure of the signs and consequences of gender and of gender and writing. Thus, at the same time again, this current fact of the contradictory possibilities and effects, deconstruction gives questions of difference and differences that come too within and for feminism, itself not just some one position, some one fixed identity, that it raises in its theory and practice round issues of the nature and reality of women, the terms and relations of collective and individual experience and action, and so on.

Difference is a key topic and interrogation for modern theory: from psychoanalysis, with its premise of the articulation of sexual difference as constitutive of subject identity, its exploration of difference and its vicissitudes, to discursive analysis, with its premise of orders of discourse

I in which diffrence is effected as point of power and social control, to ’ deconstruction, with its premise of differmce, a dissemination of differences in which the presence of any difference is given and relayed, the trace of traces - plurality, choreography, polyidentities. To think of modem literary theory in its extensions and versions of these different accounts of difference has the potential at least strongly to focus what is perhaps the key issue for


thinking literature and its reality and its study today, namely (if one word is to suffice here) representation.

Representation is at once and inextricably a literary and a political term that comes with a question of likeness. What and how is the representative like? One answer, in the political history that is ours here in Britain, for example, invokes a general subjectivity, the individual as agent of a fundamental rationality; thus once elected, he (the masculine is appropriate for the moment for this account) does not represent any particular group or interest but realises that rationality as best he can, is representative in that. The second answer, of course, is that he represents precisely an interest, a group, is chosen in that likeness; which is our actual political history, so many struggles for representation by the middle classes, the working classes, women. The struggle for women’s suffrage is significant here in that it posed acutely the problems of the assumptions in representation and its version of likeness (finally breaking the appropriateness of the ‘he’ as representative): in what sense were women a group and what were they like? The arguments in Britain (and they were duplicated elsewhere), both from those in favour of and those against this suffrage, went the two ways: women were like men, the same identity of human reason (thus they are as able as men to vote and be representatives or thus there is no need for them to vote and be representatives since men can perfectly stand for them); women were unlike men, a different identity, like themselves (thus they need to vote and be representatives since men cannot perfectly stand for them or thus they should not have the vote and be representatives since they cannot be really representative, can only represent their particularity).

If a representative is like what he or she represents, then identity and interest determine representation, a consequence that preoccupied political thinkers during the nineteenth-century movement towards democracy. John Stuart Mill, for example, author indeed of an essay ‘On Representative Government’, urged a general extension of the suffrage but was simultaneously apprehensive of the majority rule it would bring, such rule removing decision from reason, from the capacity developed by education to transcend local and immediate desires and inclinations. From the standpoint of this apprehension, such representation is no representation at all, is the loss of universally representative reason and Mill thus turns to systems of proportional representation to ensure a voice to ‘the minority of educated minds’, the true representatives. The idea of the minority and the appeal to proportional representation, however, effectively bring direct acknowl- edgement of interest and questions as to what is to be allowed to constitute a recognised minority. Mill himself talks of ‘every minority in the whole nation, consisting of a sufficiently large number to be, on


principles of equal justice, entitled to a representative’ but remains vague as to what these principles of justice might be; potentially there are an infinite number of categories in respect of which likeness can be affirmed and representation demanded. In reality, there is a political struggle for the social definition of relevant areas for likeness, for the recognition and expression of specific identities; as today with ethnic or sexual minorities, which are then open too to the contradictions of different identities, struggles of other minorities within them. The result has been a challenge to the classical idea of representation and its institutions, even while idea and institutions have necessarily often provided the immediate terms and objectives out of which the challenge comes - it can be important at once to gain representation and to call into question the very assumptions of that in a given society. At the same time as which, along with which, modem theory has in many of its developments been offering a further challenge, itself calling into question any stable grounds for the representative, the identity of representation: thus psychoanalysis, unsettling with its account of the subject any simple possibility of ‘representing oneself’; thus deconstruction, with representation taken no longer as record or expression of some existing reality but as production of reality, with a consequent suspicion of the term itself insofar as it cannot but involve some distinction between representation and represented with the latter ‘outside’ of the former, its origin or cause or corresponding truth, this as against the generalised textuality within which representation works, which is its sole ground (‘representations as signs that refer to other signs, which refer to still other signs‘, as Jonathan Culler puts it].

What we have today, indeed, are inter alia a directly political movement (a variety of movements) around representation (demands for, critiques of); a theoretical work (a variety of kinds of work) raising problems of likeness and identity, of what could constitute representation beyond itself (the insistence on differance); a cultural saturation of signs and messages (the quantitative and qualitative extension of the media, notably television) neutralising representation in their flow to leave it as an anachronism (archaic historical expression of significant social-individual identity where what counts in the present-future is ceaseless social availability in and as reception; ‘a screen does not represent anything’, writes Jean Baudrillard, a t t a c h antiquated analysis in representational terms: ‘quite simply, there is no longer any social signified to give force to a political signifier’]. Ideology, to come back to that and its removal from modem theory, dis- appears along with representation from the postmodern condition of saturation, the world of network and simulacra, while simultaneously retrieved as necessary analytic hold on the given social reality and as


necessary site of struggle by the politics of representation. Literature, traditionally as such distinctively distinct from ideology, its criticism a response to this distinction, is run into language, the force of that (Derrida’s ‘force which is the other of language without which this latter would not be what it is’), as is its reading as theory (non-theory), the ‘linguistics of literariness’ announced by de Man, which ‘more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, . . . is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence’. The specialisation of literature ‘outside’ political-ideological categories, just facts and the words on the page and life perhaps (Leavis: ‘life is a necessary word’], comes back as the specialisation of literature, literariness, text as fundamental truth of the political- ideological, the most, the more than any other, the truly radical knowledge.

The crisis in the object of literary studies - the idea of and the approach to literature - that modern literary theory has brought is thus paradoxical, and contradictory in its possibilities and effects. Literature is displaced, fragmented, removed from any separate essence of identity (so, for instance, the borderlines between literary and non-literary discourses are blurred), plunged into textuality (‘there is no identity in itself of a piece of writing’, a crucial Derrida emphasis], and brought back in that very textuality, the literariness, the madness of words (literature as the continual moment of the reading of that, the ahistorical attention to the inevitable fictions and aporia of ‘embodied meaning’; ‘it is to not read ... when one arrests the text in a certain position, thus settling on a thesis, meaning or truth’ - Derrida again]. And that displacement and that return in textuality, rhetorical readings, exist along with and in relation to fundamental pressures on the object, on literature: pressures from media and new informational networks, from the cultural saturation of meanings, pressures for differences against any given identity, for example as national unity - ‘the canon of English literature‘. What representation or representations of literature can currently hold? There are various answers and strategies: deconstruction but also the elaboration of new canons; poetics, structuralist or other, but also the dissolution of the literary into the cultural, cultural studies.

The question of the representation of literature returns us to representation which brings the problems crucially together with their loose ends and divergencies and frictions and impasses. If there is something today that we can usefully call literature (usefully and not archaically, and not essen- tialisingly, and not .. ., etc.), it is the writing and reading of the struggle for representation, understanding that as the exploration of likeness and difference, differences, the expression of socio-historical identities and their


contradictions, the examination and critique and recasting of the very terms of representation, its language, its orders, its signs. Literature as such, in this perception of its reality, is excessive: excessive, for instance, to identity and to the questioning ofidentity, to language in position and to language in play, to work and to text. Something of which is indicated at once by Toni Morrison’s account of the black woman writer’s relation to the tradition of the novel, form to be opened up in a deconstructive-dialogic unmaking of its modes of identity and form at the same time to be asserted in the statement and claiming of identity (this example of Toni Morrison was suggested by Jacqueline Rose in an earlier Critical Quarterly, Winter 1987). Or may be indicated again, differently, by Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Passers-by among the passing words’ [‘You who pass among the passing worddtake your names and go’) which says the aspiration for the end of the Israeli occupation and the establishment of an independent Palestine, powerfully articulates the feelings and experience of nation and homeland, and does so in and as a poem, itself passing words, that shifts and changes the given representation, moving through an interchange of we and you that leaves things unsettled, writes a different history indeed - but then again does write just that, a history for now.

The Darwish poem is a dramatic reminder of the reality of symbolic act as act, literature in the world; at the height of the intifuda, the ‘stone revolution’, it becomes a matter of debate in the Knesset, provokes a whole question of reading, of conflict in representation. Dramatic reminder, general fact: the struggle for representation is literary and political together, which is not to make the two one and the same (‘reducing’, as is said, literature to politics) but precisely to stress representation. What is then at stake is literature in effect, productive force, but not within the old or new old boundaries of text or textuality, not within any specialisation as separate sphere or as all-encompassing knowledge of language, itself indeed as ultimate theory.

’The resistance to theory is . . . a resistance to reading’, comments de Man, specifying theory as the particularity of the literary, textual knowledge; ‘it is the critic’s job to provide resistances to theory’, comments Edward Said, specifying theory as abstraction from the particularity of historical process. Literature produces actions and relationships, which is what the attention to representation now needs to focus and in which questions of ideology and value are to be grasped, the struggle for representation in the writing- reading that literature is. That struggle today, the evaluation of literature, is bound up politically with the initiation of new forms, forms that involve participation rather than delegation, dependent on significant associations of people rather than recorded majorities, moving towards the development


of non-representative representation: the realisation of modes of presentation and imaging and entertainment and argument that are realisations of collective desire, group aspirations, common projects, shared experience at the same time that they refuse all ideas - all expression - of standing in for and subsuming the heterogeneous individual -sociality/social- individuality of the actual lives of actual men and women. The pressures today from the contradictions of different identities, and in movement (not static givens), across the individual as well as the society (the individual no one identity either), challenge the old conceptions of and faith in representation with its assumptions of the representative, x for y, like and in place of, a democracy of substitutes in which the social is never ours. A non-representative representation will be as good as its moments of use, its particularity at any time in this or that context; with no claims to be representative beyond those moments, guaranteed not by some prior settled referent but by the reference it finds in its production in use.

A modern literary theory in these terms would then be critically involved in this production of literature. Theory is to be developed, wrote Brecht, outlining a proposal for the journal Kritische Blutter and concerned with ‘the rehabilitation of theory in its productive rights’, ‘at the points where works “bring together” literature and life’: ‘such a criticism transforms finished works into unfinished works’. The conjunction of theory and criticism, a critical theory now, would hold to textual reading, to that version of theory, as demonstration of the relations and movements and twists and turns of meaning, including in that demonstration the specific situation of its own procedures and processes, at the same time that it would enter a resistance in that same theory, the resistance of the politics of meaning and evaluation, the deployment precisely of the given text as representation, a situation of writing-reading with effects (not simply ’textual’). This would be to change - to unfinish - the object literature, to catch up its excess differently - representation as excessive to the difference that deconstruction and its success has canonised, as representing in differences and the difficulties of that; which is exactly to join literature today in use.

CO 31.2-D

Documents

Modern literary theory