williams - marxism and literature (intro, chs 1 & 2)

7/30/2019 Williams - Marxism and Literature (Intro, Chs 1 & 2)

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lII

Marxism andLiteratureRAYMOND WILLIAMS

Oxford University Press


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Introduction

This book is written in a time of radical change. Its subject,Marxism and Literature, is part of this change. Even twentyyears ago, and e s p ~ c i a l l y in the English-speaking countries, itwould have been possible to assume, on the one hand, thatMarxism is a settl ed body of theory or doctrine, and, on the otherhand, that Literature is a settled body of work, or kinds of work,with known general qualities and properties . A book of this kindmight then reasonably have explored problems of the relationsbetween them or, assuming a certain relationship, passedquickly to specific applications. The situation is now very different. Marxism, in many fields, and perhaps especially in cultural theory, has exper ienced at once a significant revival and arelated openness and flexibility of theoretical development. Literature, meanwhile, for relat ed reasons, has become problematicin quite new ways.The purpose of this book is to introduce this period of activedevelopment, and to do so in the only way that seems appropriate to a body of thinking still in movement, by attempting atonce to clarify and to contribute to it. This involves, necessarily,reviewing earlier positions, both Marxist and non-Marxist. Butwhat is offered is no t a summary; it is both a critique and anargument.One way of making clear my sense of the situation from whichthis book begins is to describe, briefly, the development of myown position, in relation to Marxism and to literature, which,between them, in practice as much as in theory, have preoc_-cupied most of my working life. My first contacts with Marxistliterary argument occurred when I came to Cambridge to readEnglish in 1939: not in the Faculty but in widespread student

d i ~ c u s s i o n . I was already relatively familiar with Marxist, or atleast socialist and communist, political and economic analysisand argument. My experience of growing up in a working-classfamily had led me to accept the basic political position whichthey supported and clarified. The cultural and literary arguments, as I then encountered them, were in effect an extensionfrom this, or a mode of affiliation to it. I did not then clearlyrealize this. The dependence, I believe, is still not generally


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2 Marxism and Literaturerealized, in its full implications H dlxist for primarily cultural I' t . ar y anyone becomes a_Mar-politicalan d economic re or I e ; ~ reasons, for compellingthe seventies that is n d e ~ = ~ : s d ~ r ~ e n c i e s of the thirties orof thought and c . d . . a e, ut It can mean that a styleapplied, in good ; : ~ ~ a s ~ : ~ f ; o f . ~ s i t ~ o n s a r ~ picked up andnecessarily havin h . 0 1 Ica commitment, without without n e c e s s a r ~ y f ~ ~ ~ o ~ ~ ~ : p ~ n d e n ~ s u t s t ~ c e and ~ n d e e dargument. This is ho w I would o w o ~ s c r i ~ e ;.sic a n a i y ~ I ~ an da student between 1939 d . . yownposihonashighly selective Marxism ~ - e x ~ : ~ d , ~ : ; ; ~ ~ l a c o . ~ i d e n tnary academic work unt'l th . . . . y, WI my ordinegotiabie as b e t w e e ~ s t u ~ e n t : m c ~ m h a t i ? I h t y - fairly eas ilyestablishment b an w at Is seen as a teachingpolemics bu t h ; s h i ; c : : ~ ~ roblem 1no t for campaigns orcould call m ~ own thinki g , ~ myse f an d for anything that I

shared with th d . ng. at I really learned from, andment was V:hatei ; : n a n t tones of t?at E.nglish Marxist argu-populism. I t was an a c ~ 1 v : o : ~ ~ \ : t ~ 1 With respect, a radicalcerned rather more (and to :t d 1 e POJ?ular tendency, conthan with judging it and Is a vantage) With making literatureliterature to the lives' of th o n ~ e r 1 _ 1 e d above aU to relate activesame time alongside this ei:UaJonty of our own people. At therelatively a r r o w and th ' s range even of Marxist ideas wasargument hi hi ,d ere ~ e r e m.any problems and kinds ofit did n t' g y e v e l o p ~ d ~ ~ s p e c i a l i z e d studies, with which. o connect an d whiCh It could therefo f .

miss. As the consequent d'ff' It' re .o ten only dis-activity an d interest with i n ~ ~ ~ Ies e m e r g ~ d , m the areas ofally concerned I b . was most duectly and personwhich have s i ~ c e ~ : s ~ n J m g and defining a set of problemsisolated in the changing e i ' t ' m ~ s t ~ my work. Exceptionallylater forties and early i f t i e ~ ;uitural formations of thein which some of these u e ~ t i o ~ : ? hisbover an area of studieseven posed. At the sam t' I mdig t e an.swered, an d some e Ime rea more widely in M contmumg to share most of its 1 t' 1 d . ~ ~ I s m ,but carryin po I Ica an economic positionsa certain c : n ~ ~ i ~ s o ; ; ~ ~ ~ ~ : u r ~ ~ : ~ d l i t ~ r : y work an d inquiry atbook Culture and Societ . . peno Is summed up in mychapter on 'Marxism an/canltud, the present context, in itsB f u re.ut rom the mid-fifties n f, bly what came to be a l l e d ~ : ~ r _ : ~ t ~ o t n i s f , w e r e d e m e r ~ i n ? , notae ou n , at this time, an

1 Introduction Immediate affinity with my own kind of cultural and literarywork (in positions which ha d in fact been latent as early as thework in Politics and Letters in 1947 and 1948; positions whicht remained undeveloped because the conditions for such a formal tion did not then fully exist). I found also, and crucially, Marxistf thinking which was different, in some respects radica lly differ/ ent, from what I and most people in Britain knew as Marxism.1There was contact with older work that had not previously come1our way- that of Lukacs an d of Brecht, for example. There was! new contemporary work in Poland, in France, an d in BritainI itself. And while some of this work was exploring new ground,f much of it, just as interestingly, was seeing Marxism as itself aI historical development, with highly variable and even alternai tive positions.I began then reading widely in the history of Marxism, trying

especially to trace the particular formation, so decisive in cultural and literary analysis, which I no w recognize as having' been primarily systematized by Plekhanov, with much supportfrom the later work of Engels, and popularized by dominanttendencies in Soviet Marxism. To see that theoretical formationclearly, and to trace its hybridization with a strong native radical( populism, was to understand both my respect for and my dis-ll tance from what I had hitherto known as Marxism tout court. I twas also to gain a sense of the degree of e l e c t i o ~ and interpreta-1 tion which, in relation both . o Marx an d to the whole long1,, Marxist argument and inquiry, that familiar and orthodox posi-tion effectively represented. I could then read even the Englishj Marxists of the thirties differently, and especially Christopher Caudwell. I t is characteristic that the argument about Caudwell,I which I had followed very carefully in the late forties and earlyfifties, had centred on the question characteristic of the style of

that orthodox tradition: 'are his ideas Marxist or not?'. It is a stylethat has persisted, in some corners, with confident assertions1 that this or that is or is not a Marxist position. But now that I1 knew more of the history of Marxism, and of the variety ofselective and alternative traditions within it, I could at last get. free of the model which had been such an obstacle, whether in1 certainty or in doubt: th e model of fixed and known MarxistI[ positions, which in general ha d only to be applied, and thecorresponding dismissal of all other kinds of thinking as non-1 Marxist, revisionist, neo-Hegelian, or bourgeois. Once the cen-


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4 Marxism and Literaturetral. b.ody of .thinking was itself seen as active, developing,unf1mshed, an.d persistently contentious, many of the questionswere o p ~ n a gam, and, as a matter of fact, my respect for the bodyof thinking as a whole, including the orthodox tradition now

~ e e n as a tendency within it, significantly and decisivelyu ~ c r e a s e d . I have come to see more and more clearly its radical~ b f f e r e n c e s from other bodies of thinking, but at the same timeIts complex connections with them, and its many unresolvedproblems.

It was in this situation that I felt the excitement of contact withmore new Marxist o ~ k : the later work of Lukacs, the later workof Sartr.e, the developmg work of Goldmann and of Althusser,the Variable and developing syntheses of Marxism and someforms s ~ u c t u r a l i s m . At the same time, within this significantnew activity, there was further access to older work, notably thatof the. F r a n k f u r ~ School {in its most significant period in thet"':enties and thuties) and especially the work of Walter Benjamm; the ~ a o r d i n a r i l y original work of Antonio Gramsci; and,as a decisive element of a new sense of the tradition, newly

t r ~ n s l a t e d ~ o r k of Marx and especially the Grundrisse. As allthis came m, ~ u r i n g . sixties and early seventies, I oftenreflected, and m Cambndge had direct cause to reflect on thec o n ~ a s t between the situation of the socialist student literature lll1940 and in 1970. More generally I had reason to reflecton contrast for any student of literature, in a situation inwhich a r g u i ? - ~ n t t h ~ t had drifted in to deadlock, or into local~ d partial p o s i t ~ o n ~ . m the late thirties and forties, was beingvigorously and s1gmficantly reopened.

In the early seventies I began discussing these issues in lectures and classes in Cambridge: at first with some oppositionfrom some of my Faculty colleagues, who knew {but did notknow) what Marxism and Literature amounted to. But this matt e r ~ d less than the fact that my own long and often internal ands o h t ~ d e b a t ~ with what I had known as Marxism now took itsplace .seriOus and extending international inquiry. I had?PPortumt!es to extend my discussions in Italy, in Scandinavia,m France, m North America, and in Germany, and with visitorsfrom Hungary, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. This book is~ e r e ~ u l t of hat period of discussion, in an international contextm w h 1 ~ h I have had the sense, for the first time in my life, ofbelonging to a sphere and dimension ofwork in which I could

Introduction 5feel at home. But I have felt, at every point, the history of theprevious thirty-five years, during which any contribution Imight make had been developing in complex and in direct if often unrecorded contact, throughout, with Marxist ideas andarguments.

That indiv idual history may be of some significance in relation to the development of Marxism and of thinking about Marxism in Britain during that period. But i t has a more immediaterelevance to the character of this book, and to its organization. Inmy first part I discuss and analyse four basic concepts: 'culture','language'. 'literature'. and 'ideology'. None of these is exclusively a Marxist concept, though Marxist thinking has contributed to them- at times significantly, in general unevenly. Iexamine specifically Marxist uses of the concepts, but I amconcerned also to locate them within more general developments. This follows from the intellectual history I havedescribed, in that I am concerned to see different forms of Marxist thinking as interactive with other forms of thinking, ratherthan as a separated history, either sacred or alien. At the sametime, the re-examination of these fundamental concepts, andespecially those of language and of literature, opens the way tothe subsequent critique. and contribution. In my second part Ianalyse and discuss the key concepts of Marxist cultural theory,on which - and this is an essential part of my argument -Marxist literary theory seems to me in practice to depend. It isnot onlyan analysis of elements of a body of thinking; it exploressignificant variations and, at parti cular points and especially inits later chapters, introduces concepts of my own. In my thirdpart, I again extend the discussion, into questions of literarytheory, in which variants of Marxism are now interactive withother related and at times alternative kinds of thinking. In eachpart, while presenting analysis and discussion of key elementsand variants of Marxist thinking, I am concerned also to developa position which, as a matter of theory, I have arrived at over theyears. This differs, at several key points, from what is mostwidely known as Marxist theory, and even from many of itsvariants. It is a position which can be briefly described as cultural materialism: a theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary production within historical materialism. Itsdetails belong to the argument as a whole, but I must say, at thispoint, that it is, in my view, a Marxist theory, and indeed that in


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6 Marxism and Literatureits specific fields i t is, in spite of and even because of the relativeunfamiliarity of some of its elements, part of what! at least see asthe central thinking of Marxism.To sustain analysis, discussion, and the presentation of newor modified theoretical positions, I have had to keep the book ina primarily theoretical dimension. In many quarters this will bewell enough understood, and even welcomed. But I ought to say,knowing the strength of other styles of work, and in relationespecially to many ofmy English readers, that while this book isalmost wholly theoretical, every position in i t was developedfrom the detailed practical work that I have previously undertaken, and from the consequent interaction with other, including implicit, modes of theoretical assumption and argument. Iam perhaps more conscious than anyone of the need to givedetailed examples to clarify some of the less familiar concepts,but, on the one hand, this book is intended as in some respects astarting-point for new work, and, on the other hand, some of theexamples I would offer are already written in earlier books. Thusanyone who wants to know what I 'really, practically' mean bycertain concepts can look, to take some leading instances, at theexemplification of signs and notations in Drama in Performance; of conventions in Drama from Ibsen to Brecht; of structures of feeling in Modern Tragedy, The Countzy an d the City,and The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence; of traditions,institutions, and formations, and of the dominant, the residual,and the emergent in parts of Culture and Society and in thesecond part of The Long Revolution; and of material culturalproduction in Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Iwould now write some of these examples differently, from amore developed theoretical position and with the advantage of amore extended and a more consistent vocabulary (the latter itselfexemplified in Keywords). But the examples need to be mentioned, as a reminder that this book is not a separated work oftheory; it is an argument based on what I have learned from allthat previous work, set into a new and conscious relation withMarxism.I am glad, finally, to be able to say how much I have learnedfrom colleagues and students in many countries and especiallyin the University of Cambridge; in Stanford University, California; in McGill University, Montreal; in the Istituto UniversitarioOrientale, Naples; in the University of Bremen; and in the Insti-

Introduction 7

tute for the Study of Cultural Development, Belgrade. Ipersonal thanks to John Fekete and, over many years, to d w a ~Thompson and Stuart Hall. The book could not have been t -b;,n withou t the unfailing co-operation and support of my w1fe.R.W.


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1. Culture

At the very centre of a major area of modem thought and practice, which i t is habitually used to describe, is a concept, 'culture', which in itself, through variation and complication,embodies not only the issues but the contradictions throughwhich i t has developed. The concept a t once fuses and confusesthe radically different experiences and tendencies of its formation. It is then impossible to carry through any serious culturalanalysis without reaching towards a consciousness of the concept itself: a consciousness that must be, as we shall see, historical. This hesitation, before what seems the richness ofdeveloped theory and the fullness of achieved practice, has theawkwardness, even the gaucherie, of any radical doubt It isliterally a moment of crisis: a jolt in experience, a break in thesense of history; forcing us back from so much that seemedpositive and available - all the ready insertions into a crucialargument, all the accessible entries into immediate practice. Yetthe insight cannot be sealed over. When the most basic concepts- the concepts, as i t is said, from which we begin- are suddenly seen to be not concepts but problems, not analytic problems either but historical movements that are still unresolved,there is no sense in listening to their sonorous summons or theirresounding clashes. We have only, if we can, to recover thesubstance from which their forms were cast.Society, economy, culture: each of these 'areas' , now taggedby a concept, is a comparatively recent historical formulation.'Society' was active fellowship, company, 'common doing',before it became the description of a general system or order.'Economy' was the management of a household and then themanagement of a community before it became the descript ion ofa perceived system of production, distribution, and exchange.'Culture', before these transitions, was the growth and tendingof crops and animals, and by extension the growth and tendingof human faculties. In their modem development the three concepts did not move in step, but each, at a critical point, wasaffected by the movement of the others. At least this is how wemay now see their history. But in the ru n of the real changeswhat was being pu t into the new ideas, and to some extent fixed


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12 Marxism and Literaturein them, was an always complex and largely unprecedentedexperience. 'Society' with its received emphasis on immediate

r e l a t i o J ? s h i p ~ was a conscious alternative to the formal rigiditiesof an Inherited, then seen as an imposed, order: a 'state'.'Econ?my', with its received emphasis on management, was aconscious attempt to understand and control a body of activitieswhich ha d been taken not only as necessary but as given. Each~ o n < : e p t interacte? with a changing history and experience.So?Iety, chosen for Its substance and immediacy, the 'civilsociety' which could be dist inguished from the formal rigiditiesof 'state', became in its turn abstract and systematic. Newdescriptions became necessary for the immediate substancewhich 'society' eventually excluded. For example, 'individual ',which had once meant indivisible, a member of a group, wasdeveloped to become not only a separate bu tan opposing term'the individual' and 'society'. In itself and in its derived andqualifying terms, 'society' is a formulation of the experience wenow summarize as 'bourgeois society': its active creation,against the rigidities of the feudal 'state'; its problems and its

l ~ i . t s , ":'ithin this kind of creation, until it is paradoxicallydtstmgmshed from and even opposed to its own initialimpulses. Similarly, therationality of 'economy', as a way of~ n d e r s t a n d i n g and controlling a system of production, distribution, and exchange, in direct relation to the actual ins titution of anew kind of economic system, persi sted bu t was limited by thevery problems i t confronted. The very product of rationalinstitution and control was projected as 'natural', a 'naturaleconomy', with laws like the laws of the ('unchanging') physicalworld.

lv!-ost modem social thought begins from these concepts, withthe inherent marks of their formation and their unresolved problems usually taken for granted. There is then 'political', 'social'or sociological', and 'economic' thought, and these are believedto describe 'areas', perceived entities. It is then usually addedthough sometimes reluctantly, that there are of course othe;'areas': notably the 'psychological' and the 'cultural'. But whileit is better to admit these than neglect them, i t is usually not seenthat their forms follow, in practice, from the unresolved problems of the initial shap ing concepts. Is 'psychology' 'individual'('psychological')or 'social'? That problem can be left for disputewithin the appropriate discipline, until i t is noticed that it is the

Culture 13problem ofwhat is 'social' that the dominant development of'society' has left unresolved. Are we to understand 'culture' as'the arts', as 'a system of meanings and values:, or as a 'wholeway of life', and how are these to be related to 'society' 'theeconomy'? The questions have to be asked, but we are unlikelyto be able to answer them unless we recognize the problemswhich were inherent in the concepts 'society' and 'economy'and which have been passed on to concepts like 'culture' by theabstraction an d limitation of those terms.The concept of culture', when it is seen in the broad context ofhistorical development, exerts a strong pressure against thelimited terms ofall the other concepts. That is always its advantage; it is always also the source of its ~ i f f i c u l t i e s , both i?definition and comprehension. Until the eighteenth century 1twas still a noun of process: the culture of something-crops,animals, minds. The decisive changes in 'society' and'economy' had begun earlier, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; much of their essential development was complete before 'culture' came to include its new and elusive meanings. These cannot be understood unless we realize what hadhappened to 'society' and 'economy'; bu t equally none can befully understood unless we examine a decisive modem . o x ; t ~ e p twhich by the eighteenth century needed a new word-ctviliza-

tion. . . .The notion of 'civilizing', as bringing men wtthm a soCialorganization, was of course already kn_own; i t e ~ t e ~ on i " ; i ~ ? dcivitas, and its aim was expressed m the adJective CIVIl asorderly, educated, or polite. I t was positively extended, as wehave seen, in the concept of civil society'. But c i v i l i z a ~ i o n ' wasto mean more than this. It expressed two senses which wereJhistorically linked: an achieved state, which couldb.e contrastedwith 'barbarism', but now also an achieved state of d e ~ e l o p -ment, which implied historical process and progres.s. This wasthe new historical rationality of the Enlightenment, m fact combined with a self-referring celebration of an achieved conditionof refinement and order. It was this combination that was to beproblematic. The developmental perspective of the h a r a c t e r ~ s -tic eighteenth-century Universal History was of course significant advance. It was the crucial step beyond the relativelystatic ('timeless') conception of history which had dependedreligious or metaphysical assumptions. Men had made theu


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14 Marxism and Literatureown hist?ry, in this special sense: that they {or some of them)had acb1eved 'civilization'. This process was secular and

~ ~ L b p m ~ n t a l , and in that sense historical. But at the same timeIt a history that had culminated in an achieved state: inp r a c ~ I c e . the m e t ~ o p o l ~ t a n civilization of England and France.

JThe mststen. rational ity whic. h. explored and informed all thstages and difficulties of this process came to an effective stopthe pomt where civilizationcould be said to have been achievedI n d e e ~ all that could be rationally projected was the e x t e n s i o ~and triUmph of these achieved values.

This o s i t i o ~ , already under heavy attack from older religiousand metaphysical systems and their associated notions of orderbecame l n e r a b l e new ways. The two decisive responsesmodern kind were, fust, the idea of culture, offering a differentsense?f u m a n g r ~ w t h and development, and, second, the idea0f ocialism, offermg a social and historical criticism of anda t e ~ a t i v e to . ' ~ i v i l i z a t i o n ' and 'civil society' as fixed an dachteved conditions. The extensions, transfers, and overlapsb e t w e e ~ all these shaping modern concepts, and e t w e ~ n themand r e ~ 1 d u a l concepts of much older kinds, have been quiteexceptionally complex. ' C i v i l i z . a t i o ~ a? d ;culture' (especially in its common earlyform as .cultivation ) were in effect, in the late eighteenthcentury, mterchangeable terms. Each carried the problematicdouble sense of an achieved state and of an achieved state ofd?velopment. Their eventual divergence has several causes.; u ~ t . f!:te;e w ~ attack on 'civilization' as superficial; an, r t i f t c i a ~ as d t s t ~ n c t from a 'natural' state; a cultivation of, x t e r n ~ ! p r o p e r t i e s ~ politeness and luxury-as against moretm a n needs and. Impulses. This attack, from Rousseau onough. the Romantic movement, was the basis of one importanta l t e r . n ~ t i v e senseof culture'-a s a process of inner' or spiritual'as. distmct fi;om 'external' development. The primary effect of~ u s . alternative was to associate culture with religion, art, the, I ~ d _r:ersonallife, as distinct from or actually opposed toClVIhzatwn. or 'society' in its ne w abstract and general sense. Itfrom this sense, though not always with its full implications, that ' c u l t u r ~ as a general process of 'inner' developmentwas extended to mclude a descriptive sense of the means and~ ~ r k s . o f such development: that is, 'culture' as a general classificatiOn of the arts', religion, and the institutions and practices

Culture 15of meanings and values. Its relations with 'society' were thenproblematic, for these were evidently 'social' institutions andpractices bu t were seen as distinct from the aggregate of generaland 'external' institutions and practices now commonly called'society'. The difficulty was ordinarily negotiated by relating'culture', even where it was evidently social in practice, to the'inner life' in its most accessible, secular forms: 'subjectivity','the imagination',. and in these terms 'the individual'. Thereligious emphasis weakened, and was replaced by what was ineffect a metaphysics of subjectiv ity and the imaginative process.'Culture', or more specifically 'art' and 'literature' (themselvesnewly generalized and abstracted), were seen as the deepestrecord, the deepest impulse, and the deepest resource of the'human spirit'. 'Culture' was then at once the secularization andthe liberalization of earlier metaphysical forms. Its agencies andprocesses were disti nctively human, and were generalized assubjective, bu t certain quasi-metaphysical forms- 'the imagination', 'creativity', 'inspiration', 'the al'lsthetic', an d the new positive sense of 'myth'-were in effect composed into a new pantheon.This original break had been with 'civilization' in its assumed'external' sense. But as secularization and liberalization continued, there was a related pressure on the concept of 'civilization' itself. This reached a critical point during the rapiddevelopment of industrial society and its prolonged social andpolitical conflicts. In one view this process was part of thecontinuing development of civilization: a new and higher socialorder. But in another view civilization was the achieved statewhich these new developments were threatening to destroy.'Civilization' then became an ambiguous term, denoting on theone hand enlightened and progressive development and on theother hand an achieved and threatened state, becoming increasingly retrospective and often in practice identified with thereceived glories of the past. In the latter sense 'civilization' and'culture' again overlapped, as received states rather than ascontinuing processes. Thus, a ne w battery of forces was rangedagainst both culture and civilization: materialism, commer-cialism, democracy, socialism. Yet 'culture', meanwhile, underwent yet another development.This is especially difficult to trace bu t is centrally important, since it led to 'culture' as a social-indeed specifically


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16 Marxism and Literatureanthropological and sociological-concept. The tension andinteraction between this developing sense and the other sense of'inner' process and 'the arts' remain evident and important.There was aJways, in practice, some connection between thetwo developments, though the emphases came to be very differ

.. e ~ r i ~ i n of this second sense is rooted in the ambiguity ofCIVIlization as both an achieved state and an achieved state ofdevelopment. What were the properties of this achieved stateand c o r r ~ s p o n d i n g l y the agencies of its development? In theperspective of the Universal Histories the characteristic central

p ~ o p e r t y and agency was reason-an enlightened comprehension of u r s e ~ v e s and the world, which allows us to create higherforms of social and natural order, overcoming ignorance andsuperstition and the social and political foriDS to which theyhave led and which they support . History, in this sense, was theprogressive establishment of more rational and therefore morecivilized systems. Much of the confidence of this movement wasd r ~ w n from the enlightenment embodied in the new physicalSCiences, as wel l as from the sense of an achieved social order. Itis very difficult to distinguish th is new secular sense of civiliza

t i o ~ from a comparably secular sense of culture' as an interpretation of human development. Each was a modem idea in thesense that it stressed human capacity not only to understandbutto build a human social order. This was the decisive differenceof both ideas from the earlier derivation of social concepts andsocial orders from presumed religious or metaphysical states.But when it came to identifying the real motive forces, in thissecular process of 'man making his own history', there wereradical differences of view.Thus one of the very earliest emphases on 'man making hisown history' was that ofVico, in The New Science (from 1725).He asserteda truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainlybeen made by men, and that its princip les are therefore to be foundwithin the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects onthis cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all theirenergies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it ,He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of theworld of nations or civil world, which, since men had made it , mencould hope to know. (p. 331)*

* All references are to editions specified in the Booklist.

Culture 17

Here against the grain of the time, the 'natural sciences' arerejected but the 'human sciences' given a startling newemphasis. We can know what we have made . indeed o w .by .the fact of making. The specific i n t e r p r e t ~ t 1 0 n s W : h i ~ h V1co )then offer.ed are now of little interest, but his d e ~ c r 1 p t i o ~ ofmode of development which was at once, and m t e r a ~ t i v e l ~ ,the shaping of societies and the shaping of h u m ~ n mmds tsprobably the effective origin of the general social sense o'culture'. The concept itself was remarka?ly advanced . byHerder, in Ideas on the Philosophy o[ the H 1 s t o ~ of a n k i n d(1784-91). He accepted the emphasis on the ~ s t o r 1 c a l selfdevelopment of humanity. but argued that ~ s ~ u c htoo complex to be reduced to the evolutionof a smgle prmctple,and especially to something so abstract as 'reason'; and,further that it was much too variable to be reduced to a progressiv'e unilinear development culminating in ~ u r o p e r u :civilization'. I t was necessary, he argued, to s p e a k . o f . ~ u l t u r e srather than 'culture', so as to acknowledge :rartablhty, .an?'thin any culture to recognize the complexity and var1ab1-of its shaping forces. The specific i n t e r p ~ e t a t i o n s heffered in terms of 'organic' peoples and nations, and agamstfue 'external universalism' of the Enlightenment, a;re e ~ e m e n t sf th R mantic movement and now of little active m t e r e s ~ .t e i ~ e a of a fundamental social process ~ i c h s ~ a J i l e S sreJ:fU and dist inct 'ways of life' is the effective or1gm o e

c l ~ m p a r a t i v e social sense of 'culture' and it s now necessaryplural 'cultures' , . th kableThe complexity of the concept of 'culture IS en remar .It became a noun of 'inner' process, specialized to its presumeda encies in 'intellectual life' and the arts'. It e c a m ~ a l s o ~ n o ~ nof eneral process, specialized to its r e s u m ~ d c o ~ J i . g ~ a t i o n ~ m' w ~ o l e ways of life'. I t played a crucial role m deftmtions thearts' and 'the humanities', from the first sense. n. playe, ane ually crucial role in definitions of the 'human c w n ~ e s andtl{e 'social sciences', in the second sense. Each e n d e n ~ y IS i ~ : d : rto deny any proper use of the concept to the other, m sp lmany attempts at reconciliation. In any modern h e o r y ofture, but perhaps especially in a Marxist theory, this c?mp e x ~ yis a source of great difficulty. The problem of n o w ~ ? t\1 ceoutset whether this would be a theory of 'the arts an m e -tuallife' in their relations to 'society'' or a theory of the social


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18 Marxism an d Literatureprocess which creates specific an d different ways of life', is onlythe most obvious problem.The first substantial problem is in attitudes towards 'civilization'. Here the decisive intervention of Marxism was theanalysis of 'civil society', and what within its terms was knownas 'civilization', as a specific historical form: bourgeois societyas created by the capitalist mode of production. This providedan indispensable critical perspective, but it was still largelycontained within the assumptions which had produced the concept: that of a progressive secular development, most obviously;but also that of a broadly unilinear development. Bourgeoissociety and capitalist production were at once heavily attackedan d seen as historically progressive (the latter in received terms,as in "the bourgeoi sie . . . has made barbarian an d semibarbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones", Communist Manifesto, 53). Socialism would supersede them as thenext and highest stage of the development.

It is important to compare this inherited perspective withother elements in Marxism an d . n the radical an d socialistmovements which preceded it. Often, especially in the earliermovements, influenced by an alternative tradition, includingthe radical critique of 'civilization', it was not the progressivebut the fundamentally contradictory character of this development that was decisive. 'Civilization' ha d produced not onlywealth, order, an d refinement, but as part of the same processpoverty, disorder, an d degradation. It was attacked for it s 'artificiality-its glaring contrasts with a 'natural' or 'human' order.The values upheld against it were not those of the next higherstage of development, but of an essential human brotherhood,often expressed as something to be recovered as well as gained.These two tendencies in Marxism, an d in the wider socialistmovement, have often in effect been brought together, bu t intheory an d especially in the analysis of subsequent historicalpractice need to be radically distinguished.

Th e next decisive intervention of Marxism was the rejection ofwhat Marx called 'idealist historiography', an d in that sense ofth e theoretical procedures of the Enlightenment. History wasno t seen (or no t always or primarily seen) as the overcoming ofignorance an d superstition by knowledge an d reason. What thataccount an d perspective excluded was material history, th ehistory of labour, industry as the 'open book of th e human

Culture 19faculties'. The original notion of 'man making his ow n history'was given a new radical content by this emphasis on 'manmaking himself through producing his ow n means of life. For all its difficulties in detailed demonstration this was the mostimportant intellectual advance in al l modern social thought. Itoffered the possibility of overcoming th e dichotomy between'society' and 'nature', and of discovering new constitutive relationships between 'society' an d 'economy'. As a specification ofthe basic element of the social process of culture it was a recovery of the wholeness of history. It inaugurated th e decisiveinclusion of that material historywhich had been excluded fromthe 'so-called history of civilization, which is al l a history ofreligions an d states'. Marx's ow n history of capitalism is onlythe most eminent example.But there are difficulties within this achievement. Itsemphasis on social process, of a constitutive kind, was qualifiedby the persistence of an earlier kind of rationalism, related to th eassumption of progressive u n i l i n e ~ development, as in oneversion of the discovery of the 'scientific laws' of society. Thisweakened the constitutive and strengthened a more instrumenta l perspective. Again, the stress on material history, especiallywithin the necessary polemics of its establishment, was in onespecial way compromised. Instead of making cultural histQD:material, which WM tbe..next WJCS] mmre..Jt Wi)._s_made9!=1J?.en-dent, s e c o n d a ~ , 'superstructural': a realm of 'mere' ideas,beliefs.j!rts, mlSkms, dtrtmmined by ilieb-a:5fcmafenalhistory.What matters here is not only the element of reduction;It is thereproduction, in an a l ~ . of the s e ~ a r a t i o l i O f ' c i i l i i l i e '

f r O ~ material social life, whichha d e l m l h ~ @ yin_ dealist c u ~ r a l thought. 1'1!_1!s the f u l L p Q ~ s i b i l i ~ of _t!leconcept of culture a: ~ ~ ~ ~ Q c i a l process, creatings ~ e c i f i c and d.iff8r;;


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20 Marxism and Literaturea l t e i ~ J a t i v e s e of _ l ! _ ~ e human process itself. It isthen not surprising that in the twentieth century this alternativesense has come to overlay and stifle Marxism, with some war-rant in its most obvious errors, but without having to face thereal challenge which was implicit, and so nearly clarified, in theoriginal Marxist intervention.In the complex development oftheconcept of culture', whichhas of course now been incorporated into so many differentsystems and practices, there is one decisive question which wasreturned to again and again in the formative period of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but which was on thewhole missed, or at least not developed, in the first stage ofMarxism. This is the quest ion of human language, which was anunderstandable preoccupation of the historians of civilization',and a central, even a defining question, for the theorists of aconstitutive process of 'culture', from Vico to Herder andbeyond. Indeed, to understand the full implications of the ideaof a 'constitutive human process' it is to changing c o n c ~ p t s oflanguage that we must turn.

2. Language

A definition of language is always, implicitly or explicitly, adefinition of human beings in the world. The received majorcategories-'world', 'reality', 'nature,' 'human'-may be counterposed or related to the category 'language', but i t is now acommonplace to observe that all categories, including thecategory 'language', are themselves constructions in language,and can thus only with an effort, and within a particular systemof thought, be separated from language for relational inquiry.Such efforts and such systems, nevertheless, constitute a majorpart of the history of thought. Many of the problems which haveemerged from this history are relevant to Marxism, and in certain Marxism itself has contributed to them, by extensionfrom Its basic revaluation, in historical materialism of thereceived major categories. Yet it is significant that, by ~ m p a r i -son, Marxism has contributed very little to thinking about language itself. The result has been either that limited and undeveloped versions of language as a 'reflection' of 'reality' havebeen taken for granted, or that propositions 'about language,developed within or in the forms of other and often antagonisti

~ ~ s t e m s of thought, have been synthesized with Marxist r o p o s ~l t l ~ n s about other kinds of activity, in ways wliich are. not onlyultrmately untenable but, in our own time, radically limiting tothe strength of the social propositions. The effects on cultural

t h e o ~ , and in particular on thinking about literature, have beenespectally marked.The key moments which should be of inter.est to Marxism, inthe development of thinking about language, are, first, theemphasis on language as activity and, second, the emphasis onthe history of language. Neither of these positions, on its own, isenough to restate the whole problem. I t is the conjunction andconsequent revaluation of each position that remains necessary.But in different ways, and with significant practical results, eachpos.ition transformed those habitual conceptions of languagewhtch depended on and supported relatively static ways ofthinking about human beings in the world.The major emphasis on language as activity began in theeighteenth century, in close relation to the idea of men having


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22 Marxism and Literature~ a d e their own society, which we have seen as a central l e ~ e n tin the new concept of 'culture'. In the previously d ~ m m a n ttradition, through all its variations, 'language' .and r e a l ~ t y hadbeen decisively separated, so that p h i l o s o p h t c a ~ mqmry wasfrom the beginning an inquiry into the connections betweenthese apparently separate orders. The pre-Socratic unity of thelogos, in which language was seen as at one with the order ofworld and of nature, with divine and human law, and w1threason had been decisively broken and in effect forgotten. Theradicai distinction between 'language' and 'reality', as be.tween'consciousness' and 'the material world', c o r r e s p o n d m ~actual and practical divisions between ~ e n t a l ' an ? 'physicalactivity, had become so habitual that serious a t t e ~ t w n seemednaturally concentrated on the x c e p t i o ~ a l l y ~ o ~ p h ~ a t e ? consequent relations and connections. Plato s maJor mqmry mto language (in the Cratylus} was cen tred on the problem of the correctness of naming, in which the interrelation of 'word' and'thing' can be seen to originate either in 'nature' in c . o n v e ~ tion'. Plato's solution was in effect the foundatiOn of'Idealistthought: there is an intermediate bu t constitutive realm, whichis neither 'word' nor 'thing' bu t 'form', 'essence', or 'idea'. Theinvestigation of eith er 'language' or 'reality' was then always, atroot, an investigation of these constitutive m e ~ a p h y s i c ~ l ~ f o ~ m s .Yet given this basic assumption, far-reachmg mqumes mtothe u ~ e s of language could be undertaken in particular and

~ p e c i a l i z e d ways. Language as a way of i:r:dicating reality co?ldbe stud ied as logic. Language as an accessible segment of ~ a h t y ,especially in its fixed forms in writing, could be studied asgrammar, in the sense ofits formal and 'external' ~ a p e . Finally,within the distinction between language and reahty,languagecould be conceived as an instrument used by men for specificand distinguishable purposes, and these could be studied inrhetoric and in the associated poetics. Through prolonged academic and scholastic development, these three great branches oflanguage study-logic, gram.mar, ~ n . d r h e t o r i c - t h o ~ g . hformally associated in the medieval trJVmm, became specificand eventually separated disciplines. Thus though t h e ~ m ~ d emajor practical advances, they either foreclosed exammatlonof the form of the basic distinction between 'language' and'reality', or determined the grounds, and especially the terms,in which such an examination might be made.

Language 23This is notably the case with the important medieval co ncept

of.sign, which has been so remarkably readopted in modemlinguistic thought. 'Sign', from Latin signum, a mark or token, isfntrinsically a concept based on a distinction between 'language' and 'reality'. It is an interposition between 'word' and'thing' which repeats the Platonic interposition of 'form','essence', or 'idea', but now in accessible linguistic terms. Thusin Buridan 'natural signs' are the universal mental counterpartsof reality and these are matched, by convention, with the 'artificial signs' which are physical sounds or letters. Given thisstarting-point, imp ortant investigations of the activity of language (but no t of language as an activity) could be undertaken:for example, the remarkable speculative grammars of medievalthought, in which the power of sentences and of the modes ofconstruction which underlay and complicated simple empiricalnotions of 'naming' was described and investigated. Meanwhile, however. the trivium itself, and especially grammar andrhetoric, moved into relatively formal, though immenselylearned, demonstrations of the properties of a given body of'classical' written material. What was later to be known as'literary study', and from the early seventeenth century as'criticism', developed from this powerful, prestigious, andlimited mode.Yet the whole question of the distinction between 'language'and 'reality' was eventually forced into consciousness, initiallyin a surpri sing way. Descartes, in reinforcing the distinctionandmaking it more precise, and in demanding that the criterion ofconnection should be not metaphysical or conventional bu tgrounded in scientific knowledge, provoked new questions bythe very force of his scepticism about the old answers. It was inresponse to Descartes that Vico proposed his criterion that wecan have full knowledge only of what we can ourselves make ordo. In one decisive respect this respon se was reactionary. Sincemen have not in any obvious sense made the physical world, apowerful new conception of scientific knowledge was ruled ou ta priori and was, as before, reserved to God. Yet on the otherhand, by insisting that we can understand society because wehave made it, indeed that we understand it not abstractly but inthe very process of making it, and that the activity oflanguage iscentral in this process, Vico opened a whole new dimension.

It was and is difficult to grasp this dimension, initially


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24 Marxism and Literaturebecause Vico embedded it in what can be read as a schematicaccount of the stages of language development: the notoriousthree stages of divine, heroic, and human. Rousseau, repeatingthese three stages as 'historical' and interpreting them as stagesof declining vigour, gave a form of argument to the RomanticMovement-the revival of literature as a revival of the 'original','primal' power of language. But this at once obscured the newlyactive sense of history (specializing i t to regeneration and ultimately, as this failed, to reaction) and the newly active sense oflanguage, which in being specialized to literature could bemarked off as a special case, a special entity, a special function,leaving the 'non-literary ' relations of language to reality as conventional and as alienated as before. To take Vico's three stagesliterally, or indeed as 'stages' at all, is to lose sight, as he did, ofthe dimension he had opened. For what was crucial, in hisaccount of language, was that i t emerged only at the humanstage, the divine being that of mute ceremonies and rituals andthe heroic that of gestures and signs. V e r b a l l a n g u ~ g e is thendistinctively human; indeed, constitutively human. This wasthe point taken up by Herder, who opposed any notion of language being 'given' to man (as by God) and, in effect, the apparently alternative notion of language being 'added' to man, as aspecial kind of acquisition or tool. Language is then, positively,a distinctively human opening of and opening to the world: nota distinguishable or instrumental but a constitutive faculty.Historically this emphasis on language as constitutive, likethe closely related emphasis on human development as culture,must be seen as an attempt both to preserve some idea of thegenerally human, in face of the analytical and empirical procedures of a powerfully developing natural science, and to assertan idea ofhuman creativity, in face of the increased understanding of the properties of the physical world, and of consequentlycausal explanations from them. As such this whole tendencywas in constant danger of becoming simply a new kind ofidealism-'humanity' and 'creativity' being projected asessences-while the tendencies it opposed moved towards anew kind of objective materialism. This specific fission, so fateful in all subsequent thought, was in effect masked and ratifiedby a newly conventional distinction between art (literature)-the sphere of 'humanity' and 'creativity'-and 'science'('positive knowledge')-the knowable dimension of the physi-

Language 25cal world and of physical human beings within it. Each of thekey terms-'art', 'literature', and 'science', together with theassociated 'culture ' and with such a newly necessary specialization as 'aesthetic' and the radical distinction between 'experie-?-ce' and 'experiment'-changed in meaning between the earlyeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The resulting conflicts and confusions were severe, but it is significant that in thenew situation of the nineteenth century the issues were neverreally joined on the ground of language, at any radical level,though it was precisely in relation to language that the newlyconventional distinctions most needed to be challenged.What happened instead was an extraordinary advance inempirical knowledge of languages, and a wholly remarkableanalysis and classification of this knowledge in terms which setsome of the basic questions aside. It is impossible to separate thismovement from its political history, within the dynamicdevelopment of Western societies in a period of extending col

m : ~ . i ~ i s m . Older studies of language pa d been largely containedw1thm the model of the dead 'classical' languages {which stilleffectively determined 'grammar' in both its syntactic and literary senses) and of the 'derived' modern vernaculars. Europeane x p l o r a ~ o n and colonization, meanwhile, had been dramatically expanding the available range of linguistic material. Thecritical encounter was between the European and Indian civilizations: not only in available languages but in European contactwith the highly developed methods of Indic grammatical scholars; with their alternative body of 'classical' texts. It was as anEnglishman in India that William Jones learned Sanskrit andfrom an observation of its resemblances to Latin and Greek began the work which led to classification of the Indo-European(Aryan ) and other 'families' of languages.This work, based on comparative analysis and classification,was procedurally very close to the evolutionary biology withwhich itis contemporary. I t is one of the major periods of allscholarly investigation, empirically founding not only the majorclassifications of language families, including schemes of theirevolutionary development and relationships, but also, withinthese schemes, discovering certain 'l aws' of change, notably ofsound-change. In one area this movement was 'evolutionary' ina particular sense: in its postulate of a proto-language (protoIndo-European) from which the major 'family' had developed.


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26 Marxism and LiteratureBut in its later stages i t was 'evolutionary' also in another sense.Increasing rigour in the study of sound-changes associated onebranch of language study with natural science, so that a systemof linguistic phonetics marched with physical studies of thelanguage faculty and the evolutionary origins of speech. Thistendency culminated in major work in the physiology of speechand in the field significantly designated within this area asexperimental psychology.This identification of language-use as a problem in psychology was to have major effects on concepts of language. Butmeanwhile within general language-studies there was a newphase which reinforced inherent tendencies to objectivism.What was characteristically studied in comparative philologywas a body of records of language: in effect, centrally, the alienwritten word. This assumption of the defining material of studywas already present, of course, in the earlier phase of 'classical'language studies: Greek, Latin, Hebrew. But then the modes ofaccess to a wider range of languages repeated th is ~ l i e r stance:that of the privileged (scientific) observer of a body of alienwritten material. Methodological decisions, substantially similar to those being developed in the closely related new science ofanthropology, followed from this effective situation. On the onehand there was the highly productive application of modes ofsystematic observation, classification, and analysis. On theother hand there was the largely unnoticed consequence of theprivileged situation of the observer: that he was observing (ofcourse scientifically) within a differential mode of contact withalien material: in texts, the records of a past history; in speech,the activity of an alien people in subord inate (colonialist) relations to the whole activity of the dominant people within whichthe observer gained hi s privilege. This defining situation inevitably reduced any sense of language as actively and presentlylconstitutive. The consequent objectivism of fundamental procedure was intensely productive at the level of description, butnecessarily any consequent definition of language had to be adefinition of a (specialized) philological system. In a later phaseof this contact between privileged observer and alien languagematerial, in the special circumstances of North America wherehundreds of native American (Amerindian) languages were indanger of dying out after the completion of European conquestand domination, the earlier philological procedures were

Language 27indeed, characteristically, found to be not objective enough.Assimilation of these even more alien languages to thecategories of Indo-European philology-the natural reflex ofcultural imperialism-was scientifically resisted and checkedby necessary procedures which, assuming only the presence ofan alien system, found ways of studying it in its own (intrinsicand structural) terms; This approach was a further gain in scientific description, with its own remarkable results, but at the levelof theory it was the final reinforcement of a concept of languageas an (alien) objective system.Paradoxically, this approach had even deeper effect throughone of the necessary corrections of procedure which followedfrom the new phase of contact with languages without texts.Earlier procedures had been determined by the fact that a language almost invariably presented itself in specific past texts:finished monologic utterances. Actual speech, even when it wasavailable, was seen as derived , either historically into vernaculars, or practically into speech acts which were instances of thefundamental (textual) forms of the language. Language-usecould then hardly ever be seen as itsel f active and constitutive.And this was reinforced by the political relations of theobserver-observed, where the 'language-habits' studied, over arange from the speech of conquered and dominated peoples tothe 'dialects' of outlying or socially inferior groups, theoretically matched against the observer's 'standard', were regardedas at most 'behaviour', rather than independent, creative, selfdirecting life. North American empirical linguistics reversedone part of this tendency, restoring the primacy of speech in theliteral absence of 'standard' or 'classical' texts. Yet the objectivist character of the underlying general theory came to limiteven this, by converting speech itself to a 'text'- the characteristically persistent word in orthodox structural linguistics. Lan-.guage came to be seen as a fixed, objective, and in these senses 'given' system, which had theoretical and practical priority overwhat were described as 'utterances' (later as 'performance').Thus the living speech of human beings in their specific socialrelationships in the world was theoretically reduced toinstances and examples of a system which lay beyond them.The major theoretical expression of his reified underst andingof language came in the twentieth century, in the work of Saussure, which has close affinities to the objectivist sociology of


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28 Marxism and LiteratureDurkheim. In Saussure the social nature of language is expressed as a system (langue), which is at once stable and autonom-, ous and founded in normatively identical forms; its 'utterances'

~( p a r o l e s ) are then seen as 'individual' (in abstract distinctionom 'social') uses of 'a particular language code' through an":abling ' p s y c h o - p h y ~ i c a l mechanism'. The practical results ofthis p r o f o u ~ d theoretical development, in all its phases, havebeen exceptionally productive and striking. The great body ofphilological scholarship has been complemented by a remarkable body of linguistic studies, in which the controlling concept?f a n g u ~ g e .as a formal system has opened the way to penetratIng descnptwns of actual language operations and many of theirunderlying 'laws'.This achievement has an ironic relation with Marxism. On the

~ a n d it ~ p e a t ~ an important and often dominant tendencyw1thm. Marxism Itself, over a range from the comparative~ a l y s i s and classification of stages of a society, through thed 1 s c o v e ~ of certain fundanzental laws of c h a n g ~ within theses y s ! e m ~ t l c stages, to the assertion of a controlling social' systemwhich IS a priori inaccessible to 'individual' acts of will and

i n t e l l i g ~ n c e . T h i ~ apparent affinity explains the attemptedsynthesis of Marx1sm and structural linguistics which has beenso n ~ u e n t i a l a phenomenon of the mid-twentieth century. ButMarxists have then to notice, first, that history, in its mostspecific, active, and connecting senses, has disappeared (in onetendency has been theoretically excluded) from this account ofso central a social activity as language; and second, that thecategories in which this version of system has been developedare f a m i l ~ a r . bourgeois categories in which an abstract separation and distinction between the 'individual' and the 'social'have become so habitual that they are taken as 'natural'starting-points.

In fact there was little specifically Marxist work on languagebefore the twentieth century. In their chapter on Feuerbach inThe German Ideology Marx an d Engels touched on the subject,as part of their influential argument against pure, directive consciousness. Recapitulating the 'moments' or 'aspects' of a materialist conception of history, they wrote:Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of thefundamental historical relationships, do we find that man also posses-

I .I

Language 29ses 'consciousness'; but, even so, not inherent, not 'pure' consciousness. From the start the 'spirit' is afflicted with the curse of being'burdened' with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form ofagitated layers of air, sounds, in h a r t of a ~ g u a g e . L a n ~ u a g . e is as oldas _consciousness, language is practical o ~ s c 1 0 u s n ~ s s , as It exists for other I/men and for that reason is really begmnmg to ex1st for me personally as 'well; for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, thenecessity, of intercourse with other men. (GI, 19)So far as it goes, this account is wholly compatible with theemphasis on language as practical, constitutive activity. Thed ! f f i ~ ~ hacLalso a r i s ! I D . . ~ i f f e r t : ! J : l ~ f o ~ u ~P!JndOllS--acc_ono,tfl, w 4 ~ n !}le i d e _ ~ _ 5 l f _ ~ e C Q . I ~ ~ b t u t i ~ _ ! : ? ~ J : ldown inte-:element:Lwhich _are then temporally ordered. Thusfliet;fs an -obvious a n g ~ ~ i n tb.etiliiiidn.--lco andReraer:QLmilking language pnmary an ' ', ce t a 1 J ~ esense 1s a necessary part of the very act of . _ ! ; e l f -

~ t i o n , bu t in the rerareaana av l a b l " -- ~ I i i i l g u a g e as thefOiiiW:rng e u it t ! ! _ e b e g i n n i J i g ~ ~ l h eWor . It is precisely the sense of language as an indissoliil:ilee ~ i i i e n t of human self-creation that gives any acceptable meaning to its description as 'constitutive'. To make it precede allother connected activities is to claim something quite different.The idea of language as constitutive is always in danger of thiskind of.reduction. Not only, however, in the direction of theisolated creative word, which becomes idealism, bu t also, asactually happened, in objectivist materialism and positivism,where 'the world' or 'reality' or 'social reality' is categoricallyprojected as the pre-existent formation to which language issimply a response.What Marx and Engels actually say, in this passage, points tosimultaneity and totality. The 'fundamental Wstorical relation-ships' are seen as 'moments' or 'aspects', and man then 'alsopossesses' consciousness'. Moreover, this language is material:the "agitated layers of air, sounds", which are produced by thephysical body. It.is then not a question of any temporal priorityof the 'production of material life' considered as a separable act.The distinctively human mode of this primary material production has been characterized in three aspects: needs, new needs,and human reproduction-"not of course to be taken as threedifferent stages . . . bu t . . . which have existed simultaneouslysince the dawn of Wstory and the first men, and still assert


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30 Marxism and Literaturethemselves in history today". The distinctive humanity of thedevelopment is then expressed by the fourth 'aspect', tlli}t suchroduction is rom the be innin also a lationshi . nthen invo ves from the beginning, as a necessary element, t .lltractical consciousness which is language.

Thus far e emp asis Is pr1man y cons ltut ive', in the senseof an indissoluble totality of development. But it is easy to seehow, in this direct ion also, what begins as a mode of analysis ofaspects of a total process develops towards philosophical or'natural' categories-simplematerialist statements which retainhe idealist. e p a ; a ~ o n of 'language' from 'reality' but simplyr e v ~ r s e their prtonty-and towards historical categories, inwh1ch there is first , material social produc tion and then (ratherthan also) language.. In its predominant ly positivist development, from the latemneteenth to the mid-twentieth century, a dominant kind ofMarxism made this practical reduction: no t so much directly inl a n g ~ a ~ e theory, which on the whole was neglected;but habitu-

a l l y 1ts accounts of o ~ ~ c i o u s n e s s and in its analyses of thep r a c t l c ~ l language activities which were grouped under thecategories of 'ideology' and 'the superstructure'. Moreover this~ e n d e n c y was reinforced by the wrong kind of association withImportant ~ c ~ e n t i f i c work on the physical means of language.This assoCiation was wholly compatible with an emphasis onlanguage as material, but, given the practical separation of 'theworld' and 'the language in which we speak about it', or inanother form, of reality' and 'consciousness', the materiality of

l a n g u a ~ e could be grasped only as physical-a set of physicalp r ? p e : t i ~ s - ~ n d as material activity: in fact the ordinary~ c i e n t l s b c dissociation of the abstracted physical faculty fromIts actual human use. The resulting situation had been welldescribed, in another context, by Marx, in the first 'thesis' onFeuerbach:The chief defect of all materialism up to now (including Feuerbach's) is,that the object, reality, what we apprehend through our senses, isunderstood only in the form of the object of contemplation(anschauung); but not as sensuous human activity, as proctice; notsubjectively. Hence in opposition to materialism the active side wasdeveloped abstractly by idealism-which of course does not know realsensuous activity as such. (GI, 197)

Language 31This was indeed th e situation in think ing about language. Forthe active emphases of Vico and Herder had meanwhile beenremarkably developed, notably by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Herethe inherited problem of the origin of language had beenremarkably restated. Language of course developed at some

point in evolutionary history, but it is not only that we havevirtually no information about this; it is mainly that any humaninvestigation of so constitutive an activity finds languagealready there in itself and in its presumed object of study. Language has then to be seen as a persistent kind of creation andre-creation: a dynamic presence and a constant regenerativeprocess. But this emphasis, again, can move in different directions. It could reasonably have been associated with theemphasis of whole, indissoluble practice, in which the'dynamic presence' and the 'constant regenerative process'would be necessary forms of the 'production and reproductionof real life' similarly conceived. What happened instead, inHumboldt and especially after him1. was a projection of this ideaof activity into essential ly idealist and quasi-social forms: eitherthe 'nation', based on an abstract version of the 'folk-mind' or the(ahistorical) 'collective consciousness'; or the 'collective spirit',the abstract creative capacity-self-creative bu t prior to andseparate from material social practice, as in Hegel;, or, persuasively, the 'individual', abstracted and defined as 'creative subjectivity', the starting-point of meaning.The influence of these various projections has been deep andprolonged. The abstract idea of the 'nation' could be readilyconnected with major philological work on the 'families' oflanguages and on the distinctive inher ited properties of particular languages. The abstract idea of the 'individual' could bereadily connected with the emphasis on a primary subjectivereality and a consequent 'source' of meaning and creativitywhich emerged in the Romantic concepts of art' and 'literature'and which defined a major part of the development of psychology'.Thus the stress on language as activity, which was the crucialcontribution of this line of thinking, and which was a crucialcorrection of the inherent passivity, usually formalized in the.metaphor of 'reflection', of positivism an d objectivistmaterialism, was in turn reduced from specific a ~ t i v i t i e s (thennecessarily social and material, or, in the full sense, historical) to


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32 Marxism and Literature

active ractice of Ian uage.Against Is reduct ion o anguage to instrumentality, the ideaof language as expression, which was the main outcome of theidealist version of language as activity, was evidently attractive.It appeared lit erally to speak toan experience of language whichthe rival theory, confined to passing information, exchangingmessages, naming objects, in effect suppressed . I t could includethe experience of speaking with others, of participating in language, of making and responding to rhythm or intonation whichhad no simple 'information' or 'message' or 'object' content: theexperience, indeed, which was most evident in 'literature' andwhich was even, by specialization, made identical with it. Yetwhat actually happened was a deep split, which produced itsown powerful categories of separation, some of them old termsin new forms: categorical divisions between the 'referential' andthe 'emotive', between the 'denotative' and the 'connotative',between 'ordinary language' and 'literary language'. Certainlythe uses towards which these categories point can be distin-

Language 33guished as the elements of specific practices, defined by specificsituations. But their projection as categories, and then theirfurther projection as separate entities, separate 'bodies' oflanguage-use, permitted a dissolution and specialization whichfor a long time prevented the basic issues of the unfinishedargument about language from becoming focused within asingle area of discourse.Marxism might have become this area of discourse, but it haddeveloped its own forms of limitation and specialization. Themost evident of these was a specialization of the whole material \social process to 'labour', which was then more and more narrowly conceived. This had its effect in the important argumentabout the origins and development of language, which couldhave been reopened in the context of the new science ofevolutionary physical anthropology. What happened insteadwas an application of the abstract concept of 'labour' as thesingle effective origin. Thus , in a modern authoritative account:First labour, then articulate speech, were the two chief t i m u l ~ underthe influence of which the brain of the ape gradualy changed mtohuman brain. (Fundamentals of Dialectical Materialism, ed. Schneierson, Moscow, 1967, 105)This not only establishes an abstract, two-stage temporaldevelopment. It also converts both labour and language to'stimuli', when the real emphasis should be on connected practice. This leads to an abstraction of evolutionary stages:The development of labour brought the members of t ~ e . c . o m m l . l ; n ~ t ymore closely together, for it enabled them to extend.thelr JOint actiVItyan d to support each other. Labour relations gave nse to the need forprimitive me n to speak and communicate with each other. .(Ibid. 105)This is in effect an idealism of abstracted stimuli and needs. I tlmust be contrasted with a properly materialist theory, ir:" w h i ~ hlabour and language, as practices, can be seen as evolutionarilyand historically constitutive:The argument that there couldbe no language without all the structure fof modern ma n is precisely the same as the old theory th?t human hands Vmade implement-making and using possible. But the Implements arethousands of years older than hands ofthe modern human o r m . Modern speech-producing structures are the result of the evolutionary sue-


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34 Marxism and Literaturecess of language, just as the uniquely human hand is the result of theevolutionary success of implements. 0. S. Washburn and J. B. Lancaster, Current Anthropology, vol. 12, No. 3, 1971)Any constitutive theory of practice, and especially a materialisttheory, has important effects beyond the question of origins, inrestating the problem of the active process of language at anytime: a restatement which goes beyond the separated categoriesof 'language' and 'reality'. Yet orthodox Marxism remainedstuck in reflection theory, because this was the only plausiblematerialist connection between the received abstract categories.Reflection theory, in its first period, was itself specialized tocrude stimulus-and-response models, adapted from positivistphysiology. In its second period, in the later work of Pavlov, itadded, as a way of dealing with the special properties of language, the concept of the 'second signal system', the first beingthe simple physical system of sensations and responses. Thiswas better than nothing, but it assimilated language to thecharacteristics of a 'signal system', in relatively mechanisticways, and was in practice unequal to problems of meaningbeyond simple models of the associative. Setting out from thispoint, L.S. Vygotsky (Thought and Language, Moscow, 1934)proposed a new social theory, still named the 'second signalsystem', in which language and consciousness a re freed fromsimple analogies with physical perception. His work on thedevelopment of language in children, and on the crucial problem of 'inner speech', provided a new starting-point, within ahistorical-materialist perspective. But for a generation, inorthodox Marxism, this was neglected. Meanwhile the work ofN. S. Marr, based on older models, tied language to the 'superstructure' and even to simple class bases. Dogmatic positions,taken from other areas of Marxist thinking,limi ted the necessarytheoretical developments. It is ironic that the influence of Marrwas in effect ended by Stalin in 1950 with declarations thatlanguage was not 'part of the superstructure' and that languagesdid not have any essential 'class character' but rather a 'nationalcharacter'. Ironic because though the declarations were necessary, in that context, they simply threw the argument back to amuch earlier stage, in which the status of 'reflection' and, veryspecifically, the status of 'the superstructure', had, in Marxistterms, needed question. By this time, moreover, linguistics hadcome to be dominated by a specific and distinctive form of

Language 35objectivism, which had produced the powerful systems of structuralism and semiotics. It was at this point that generally Marxist positions in other fields, especially in the popular form ofobjectively determined systems, were practically synthesizedwith theories of language which, from a fully Marxist position,needed to be profoundly opposed.A tragic element in this history is that such theories had beenprofoundly opposed in the 1920s in Leningrad, where thebeginnings of a school of Marxist linguistics, of a significantkind, had in fact emerged. It is best represented by the work ofV. N. Volosinov, whose Marxism and the PhilosophyofLanguageappeared, in two editions, in 1929 and 1930; the second editionhas been translated into English (Matejka and Titunik, NewYork and London, 1973). Volosinov had been associated withM. M. Bakhtin, author pf a study of Dostoevsky (Problemy tvorcestva Dostoevskogo, 1929; new version, with new title, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 1963); see also 'P.N. Medvedev'(author of Formal'ny metoq v 1iteraturovedenii-kriticeskoevvedenie v sociologiceskuju poetiku-The Formal Method inLiterary Scholarship : a critical introduction to sociological poetics-1928). Sometime during the 1930s Volosinov disappeared.Nearly half a century was then lost, in real terms, in thedevelopment of hi s exceptionally important realignment of theargument.Volosinov's decisive contribution was to find a way beyondIhe powerful but partial theories of expression and objectivesystem. He found it in fundamentally Marxistterms, though hehad to begin by saying that Marxist thinking about language wasvirtually non-existent. His originality lay in the fact that he didnot seek to apply other Marxist ideas to language. On the contrary he reconsidered the whole problem of language within ageneral Marxist orientation. Thl.um_abled him tp see 'activif)l'( ~ n g t h of the idealist eiDPhMis_a.f'tm:llu:rl!J?Ql!ltl as sqs;;ial

a ~ t } l : . . a n d . to see ' s y s t g ~ ( t b . e . _ s t r e n g t h of.Jhe new objectivistlinguistics) in relation to_this social actjyjty and not, as hadl!itherto been the case, o r m ~ a : r a t e d . f i ; o m it Thus in drawing on the strengths of the alternative traditions, and in settingthem side by side showing their connected radical weaknesses,he opened the way to a new kind of theory which had beennecessary for more than a century.Much of his effort went to recovering the full emphasis on

I


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36 Marxism and Literaturelanguage as activity, as practical consciousness, which had been

I ~ e a ~ ~ n e d and in f f e c t de?ied by its specialization to a closedl ~ d i v i d u a l consciOusness or 'inner psyche'. The strength ofthis tradition was still its insistence on the active creation ofmeanings, as distinct from the alternative assumption of aclosed f?rmal s ~ s t e m .. Volosinov argued that meaning wasnecessarily a social .actiOn, dependent on a social relationship.But to understand _ .s depended on recovering a full sense of'social', as distinct both from the idealist reduct ion of the socialto inherited, ready-made product, an 'inert crust', beyondwhtch all creativity was individual, and from the objectivistprojection of the social into a formal system, now autonomousand o ~ e r n e d only by its internal laws, within which, and solelyaccordmg to which, meanings were produced. Each sense, atroot, depends on the same error: of separating the social fromindividual meaningful activity (though the rival positions thenvalued the separated elements differently}. Against theP.sycho!ogism of the idealist emphasis, Volosinov argued thatconsciOusness takes shape and being in the material of signscreated by an organized group in the process of its social intercourse. The individual consciousness is nurtured on signs; it derives its growth from them; it reflects their logic and laws" (13).. Normally, it is at just this point (and the danger is alwaysIncreased by retaining the concept of 'sign', which Volosinovrevalued but continued to use) that objectivism finds its entry.'The material of signs' can be translated as 'system of signs'. Thissystem can then be projected (by some notion of a theoretical'social contract', as in Saussure, protec ted from examination bythe assumption of the priority of 'synchronic' over 'diachronic'analysis) both beyond history and beyond any active conceptionof contemporary social life, in which socially related individuals meaningfully participate, as distinct from acting out the lawsand codes of an inaccessible linguistic system. Each side ofVolosinov's argument has a continuing relevance, but it is in his(incomplete) revaluation of the concept of 'sign' that his contemporary significance is most evident., _ Y o l o ~ i n o v accepted that a 'sign' in language has indeed abmary character.(In fact, as we shall see, hi s retention of theseterms made i t easier for the radical challenge of his work to bemissed.} That is to say, he agreed that the verbal sign is notequivalent to, nor simplya reflection of, the object or quality

Language 37which it indicates or expresses. The relation within the sign .between the formal element and the meaning which this element carries is thus inevitably conventional (thus far agreeingwith orthodox semiotic theory), but it is not arbitrary* and, crucially, it is not fixed. On the contrary the fusion of formal element and meaning (and it is this fact of dynamic fusion whichmakes retention of he 'binary' description misleading) is 'theresult of a real process of social development, in the actual \.activities of speech and in the continuing development of alanguage. Indeed signs can exist only when this active socialrelationship is posited. The usable sign-the fusion of formalelement and meaning-is a product of this continuing speechactivity between real individuals who are in some continuingsocial relationship. The 'sign' is in this sense their product, butnot simply their past product, as in the reified accounts of an'always-given' language system. The real communicative ' p r o ~ducts' which are usable signs' are, on the contrary, living evidence of a continuing social process, into which individuals areborn and within which they are shaped, but to which they thenalso actively contribute, in a continuing process. This is at oncetheir socialization and their individuation: the connectedaspects of a single process which the alternative theories of'system' and''expression' had divided and dissociated. We thenfind not a reified 'language' and 'society' but an active sociallanguage. Nor (to glance back at positivist and orthodoxmaterialist theory) is this language a simple 'reflection' or'expression' of 'material reality'. What we have, rather, is agrasping of this reality through language, whiCh as practicalconsciousness is saturated by and saturates all social activity,including productive activity. And, since this grasping is socialand continuous (as distinct from the abstract encounters of'man' and 'hi s world', or 'consciousness' and 'reality', or 'language' and 'material existence'), it occurs within an active andchanging society. It is ofand to this experience-the lost middleterm between the abstract entities, 'subject' and 'object', onwhich the propositions of idealism and orthodox materialism" The.question ll whethera sign is '!!Ibitrary' is subject to some local confusion.The term was developed in distinction from the iconic ', to indicate, correctly,thatmost verbal signs are not images' of hings. But other sensesof arbitrary',in the direction of 'random' or 'casual', had developed, and it was these thatVolo8inov opposed.


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38 Marxism and Literatureare erected-that language speaks. Or to put it more directly,language is the a rticulation of this active and changing experience; a dynamic and articulated social presence in the world.Yet it remains true that the mode of articulation is specific.This is the part of the truth which formalism had grasped. Thearticulation can be seen, and in some respects has to be seen, asboth formal and systematic. A physical sound. lik..@ m ~ e rnatural elements, may be maile mto a sl but its distinction,Vo osmov argue , s s not sim yexist rea it -it e 't .W ~ ~ s i t sign, indeed what m de it a sign, is inth1s sense a tormalpfocess: a spec1 1c aning.

(Formalist lingms a emp asize this point, but it hadiscerned that the process of articulation is necessarily also amaterial process, and that the sign itself becomes part of a

\

(socially created) physical and material world: "whether insound, physical mass, colour, movement of the body or thelike". S i g n i f i c a t i o n ~ the social creation of meanings through the, of fopiial sigo . ii:.then a practical matena!Jlctivifj: l!J.sindeed, literally, a means of production. It is a specific form ofthat practical consciousnessWhiCh IS InSeparable from all socialmaterial activity. I t is not, as formalism would make it,and as theidealist theory of expression had from the beginning assumed,an operation ofand within 'consciousness', which then becomesa state or a process separated, a priori, from social materialactivity. It is, on the contrary, at once a distinctive materialprocess-the making of signs-and, in the central quality of itsdistinctiveness as pract ical consciousness, is involved from thebeginning in all other human social and material activity.Formalist systems can appear to meet this point by referring itto the 'already-given', the 'last-instance determination of theeconomic structure', as in some current versions of structural istMarxism. It is to avoid this kind of reduction that we mustconsider Volosinov's crucial distinction between a 'sign' and a'signal'. In reflexive theories of language, whether positivistkinds of materialism, or such theories as psychologicalbehaviourism, all 'signs' are in effect reduced to 'signals', withinthe simple models of 'object' an d 'consciousness' or 'stimulus'and 'response'. Meanings are created by (repeated) recognitionof what are then in effect 'signals': of the properties of an objector the character of a stimulus. 'Consciousness' and 'response'

Language 39then 'contain' (for this is what meaning now is) those propertiesor that character. The assigned passivity and mechanism of suchaccounts have often been recognized. Indeed it was against suchpassivity and mechanism that formalism had most to contribute,in its insistence on the specific (formal) articulat ion of meaningsthrough signs.But it has been less often noticed tha t quite different theories,based on the determinate character of systems of signs, depend ,ultimately, on a comparable idea of the fixed character of thesign, which is then in effect a displacement of fixed content tofixed form. Intense argument between these rival schools hasallowed us to overlook the fact that the conversion of the 'si gn'(as the term itself always made possible and even likely) intoeither fixed content or fixed form is a radical denial of activepractical consciousness. The sign, in either case, is moved in thedirection of a signal, which Volosinov distinguishes from a signby the fact that it is intrinsically limited an d invariant. The truequality of a sign (one would have preferred him to say, of asignifying element of a language) is that i t is effective in communication, a genuine fusion of a formal element and a meaning(a quality that it indeed shares with signals); but also that as afunction of continuing social activity it is capable of modification and development: the real processes that may be observedin the history of a language, but which the privileged priority of'synchronic' analysis had ignored or reduced to a secondary oraccidental character.Indeed since i t exists, as a sign, by its quality of signifyingrelationship-both the relation between formal element andmeaning (its internal structure) and the relations between thepeople who in actually using it, in practical language, make i t asign-it has, like the social experience which is the principle ofits formation, both dialectical and generative properties.Characteristically it does not, like a signal, have fixed, determinate, invariant meaning. I t must have an effective nucleus ofmeaning but in practice i t has a variable range, corresponding tothe endless variety of situations within which i t is actively used.These situations include new and changing as well as recurrentrelationships, an d this is the reality of the sign as dynamicfusion of 'formal element' and 'meaning'- 'form' and 'content '- rather than as fixed, 'already-given' internal significance.This variable quality, which Volosinov calls multi-accentual, is


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40 Marxism and Literatureof course the necessary challenge to the idea of 'correct' or'proper' meanings, which had been powerfully developed byorthodox philology from its studies of dead languages, andwhich had been taken over both into social-class distinctions ofa 'standard' language flanked either by 'dialects' or by 'errors',and into literary theories of a 'correct' or 'objective' reading. Butthe quality of variation-not random variation but variation as anecessary element of practical consciousness-bears heavilyalso against objectivist accounts o f the sign-system. It is one ofthe decisive arguments against reducti on of the key fact of socialdetermination to the idea of determination by a system. But,while it thus bears heavily against all forms of abstract objectivism, it offers a basis also for a vital reconsideration of theproblem of 'subjectivity'.The signal, in its fixed invariance, is indeeda collect ive fact. Itmay he received and repeated, or a ne w signal may be invented,but in either case the level at which i t operates is of a collectivekind: that is to say. i t has to he recognized but it need not beinternalized, at that level of sociality which has excluded (asreductive versions of the 'social' commonly exclude) active participation by conscious individuals. The signal, in this sense, isfixed, exchangeable, collective property; characteristically it iseasily both imported and exported. The true signifying elementof language mus t from the beginning have a different capacity:to become an inner sign, part of an active practical consciousness. Thus in addition to it s social and material existence between actual individuals, the sign is also part of a verbally constituted consciousness which allows individuals to use signs oftheir own initiative, whether in acts of social communica tion orin practices which, not being manifestly social, can be i n t e r ~preted as personal or private.This view is then radically opposed to the construction of allacts of communication .from pre-determined objective relationships and properties, within which no individual initiative, of acreative or self-generating kind, would be possible. It is thus adecisive theoretical rejection of mechanical, behaviourist, erSaussurean versions of an objective system which is beyondindivi

williams - marxism and literature (intro, chs 1 & 2)

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