Dialectical Methodologies the American A cademv · Dialectical Methodologies in the ... 10 Winter...

On the disintegration of historical and literary discourse

Dialectical Methodologies in the American A cademv

E W A M. T H O M P S O N

THOSE OF us who received graduate degrees in the humanities from American universities in the 1960s know that a major change took place in the academy about that time. This change can be described as an invasion and conquest of teaching and research by dialectical methodologies. I would like to discuss this change using the study of literature as my initial example.

Before the 1960s students and teachers of English were still drawing on the resources, however meager, of the New Criticism and were cranking out papers and dissertations which tightroped it between the demands of the traditional representational poetics and the claims of literary autonomy advanced by the New Critics.’ But as soon as the students mastered the New Critical methodology, they found that it was irrelevant to what was going on in the fashionable scholarly journals. For a while it seemed that one merely had to “keep abreast” and everything would be all right. However, eventually there came, for those who really paid attention, a moment of realization that something radically new was happening. Historical and literary discourse, as

represented by the leading journals, was simply becoming incomprehensible. Those who, at a considerable expenditure of time and effort, plowed through Edmund Husserl and other masters of contemporary thougKt, suddenly found that they could not make out the meaning of a short inter- pretative article b y a Yale professor. There seemed to be a discontinuity, a rupture between the fundamental assumptions about language, reality, and discourse of the “old’ critics (including the New Critics) and what was happening in the research journals.

Many weak-hearted scholars gave up. They remained entrenched in what they had come to regard, twenty or thirty years earlier, as the last cry of scholarly wisdom. They became indifferent even before they understood the premises behind the new writings. Occasionally, they expressed their in tu i t ive re jec t ion of t h e new methodologies by casting barbs at the bar- barians and by reassuring one another that the new writings were just a passing fad. In the meantime, the fad took over the field. The new writings conquered the academy by default, without massive resistance.

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At present, in literary and historical studies at American universities there exists a situation unprecedented in history where philosophical and methodological differences between the new and the old writings are so vast that they cannot be reduced to “approaches” or “insights.” They amount to a difference between two languages. While virtually all American scholars write in English, the language of some of them is the traditional logocentric English which implicitly preserves the distance between subject and object, or between the observer and the observed; which assumes that language in some way represents reality; and which posits that one can test the truthfulness of a hypothesis by subjecting it to logical scrutiny. The English of another, and much more in- fluential, group of scholars rejects such logocentric assumptions. Instead, it is grounded in the principles of dialectical thinking as outlined by Hegel, Marx, and their modern followers.

Logocentric thinking implies the existence of an absolute order, in the mind or in reality, which gives rise to meaning.* It discovers similarities in differences, and it builds on similarities, correspondences, and continuity rather than on contrast, negation, and discontinuity. Because it implicitly acknowledges the possibility of thinking in a logical fashion and because it takes experience into account, logocentric thinking does not always demand that criteria be spelled out in the definition of a concept or an idea? Logocentric thinkers exercise man’s fundamental drive to give names to things and articulate the notion of the human subject. They use language as a tool rather than yielding to the idea of being used by language. This does not mean that logocentric thinkers deny or ignore the numerous falsifications of meaning which are inherent in human ut- terances. They are, however, aware that the dialectical aspect of language, or the falsifying aspect, is different from the abili- t y of language to convey notions and ideas which cannot be conveyed directly but only indirectly, through metaphors and analogies. In other words, logocentric

thinkers make a distinction between the notion of falsification and the notion of symbol, and they insist that not all interpretation consists in pointing out falsities and ambiguities.‘ Some of it, indeed an important part of it, consists in pointing out deeper meanings of a text without de- nying the truthfulness of the superficial meaning. Logocentric thinkers do not pro- claim some false harmony in reality, and they do not deny the existence of an undercurrent of falsification in language. But they refuse to elevate falsification to the position of primary importance. They treat it the way noise and redundancy are treated in communication theory: as an inevitable but noncentral ingredient of human thinking.

Until recently logocentrism has been the prevailing mode of thought in human civilization. Logocentric thinkers ar- ticulated the notion of law and created the structures of modern democracies. They have formulated the principles of our political, social, and judicial systems. Logocentric thinking lies at the basis of all major scientific methods. It has generated all major philosophical systems with the exception of Hegelianism. It has inspired mystics and rationalists, philosophers and politicians, artists and scientists.5 Euro- pean civilization, whose fruits we all enjoy, was built by logocentric thinkers.

As religious belief diminished in circles wielding intellectual power in modern societies, logocentric thinking found itself in an increasingly awkward position. It still sustained the social and political institu- tions in the West, but it was challenged by those who proclaimed themselves to be the leaders in the life of the mind. The French philosopher of language Jacques Derrida, who is a major detractor of logocentrism, is right when he states that a fully consistent member of the present intellectual establishment must devote his or her efforts to the process of de-centering thought and must argue against what a logocentric mind perceives as causes and effects of human actions.6 Derrida’s de-centered, dialectical vision of reality is for that reason at the heart of contemporary efforts

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finally to destroy logocentric thinking and deny respectability to those scholars who adhere to it.

Logocentric thinkers, on the other hand, seem to realize more and more clearly the implications of their intellectual position. The implications consist in coming to terms with the idea of order in reality and where it comes from. Hence, in addition to the secular definition of logocentrism which was quoted above, definitions of a non-secular nature have been offered with increasing frequency in recent years. In the words of David Tracy, logocentrism implies some prime analogue, some primary focal meaning from which all other analogies derive.’ For Paul Ricoeur it implies that “language, which bears symbols, is not so much spoken by men as spoken to men, that men are born into language, in- to the light of the logos ‘who enlightens every man who comes into the world.’ ” 8

For Denis Donoghue, it implies that “the primal act, so far as human history is con- cerned, is one by which a divine power ut- tered itself and created the world in the mode of an utterance. In that tradition, alphabetic or phonetic writing is perceived as a transcript of speech; it is deemed to be preceded by the primary act within the terms of l ~ g o s . ” ~

Logocentrism did, of course, undergo modifications in recent intellectual history. Developments in psychology and linguistics, new evidence and new concep- tualization, necessitated adjustments in the interpretation of events and texts. In the area of literary interpretation, these changes were championed by the New Critics. They criticized the unlearned reader’s surrender to the author’s overt in- tention and succeeded in discrediting the brittle sterility of the naive and pious ex- egetes of literature. But the efforts of the New Critics were grounded in the logocentric tradition. The New Critics tried to refine meaning rather than to destabilize it. Their students have learned that thought is always mediated by language and circumstance and that it never appears in its Platonic purity.

But barely had the students digested all

that, barely had they begun to com- prehend the thesis that thought, communication, and language are for practical purposes inseparable, than their wisdom was declared invalid by the new breed of scholars: the dialectical thinkers. In the writings of these thinkers words such as fact, the human subject, representation, objective reality, have been emptied of meaning assigned to them by centuries of logocentric discourse and have been declared to be products of false consciousness which has to be eradicated before the correct thinking process can take place. Truth, if it is dealt with at all, is declared to be non-representational, which precludes its usefulness as a goal of investigation. Formal logic is declared to be a means of self-deception or a tool of social and intellectual oppression.

Dialectical thought does, of course, go back to Hegel, who understood dialectics as the struggle of opposites, and their unity and identity, in reality and in human thinking. He held that this struggle is both inevitable and desirable, and this determinism was embraced by all of his important followers. Hegel bequeathed this legacy to Karl Marx and through him to a vast army of modern dialecticians. In contemporary intellectual life, dialectical thinking is practised by sympathizers of the Frankfurt School, by the so-called vulgar Marxists in the Soviet Union, by independent revisionist Marxists in the West, and by those who simply declare themselves Hegelians. As argued below, in spite of the differences in sophistication, their initial premises are remarkably similar.

The four dialecticians considered below-Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, Claude LCvi-Strauss, and Georg Lukics - represent four distinct dialectical methodologies, in addition to belonging to three different nations. All four have been spectacularly successful on American campuses. De Man represents abstruse scholarly adherence to the dialectical principle. He is typical of those who exert influence on other scholars rather than on the educated public. LCvi-Strauss is likewise arcane to the point of being inaccessible to

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the general public. However, the premises consciousness of a dialectical thinker is said of his study of “super-structures” in to transcend ordinary thought processes primitive society exerted much influence and thus escape logical and empirical ac- on the academic community. He countability. Fredric Jameson put it this represents those dialecticians who try to way: reinterpret huge segments of history rather than the specific events of recent times. Jameson and Lukdcs deal with modern times, and they dwell on a lower level of abstraction in their dialectical analyses of literature and society; for that reason, they are directly accessible to college-educated persons. Jameson’s writings are a typical example of the open and successful Marx- ism in the American university; they are self-confident, dynamic, and aggressive. Lukdcs, a Hungarian, represents those foreign Marxist scholars who acquired a fine reputation in the American academy in the 1950s and 1960s, in spite of the fact that they maintained close ties with the “vulgar” Soviet Marxists.

These thinkers, as well as some others to whom I refer below, display remarkable unanimity in their dogmatic acceptance of dialectical principles. They vary in em- phasis, in the degree of abstraction, and even in the interpretation of individual social and literary texts; they do not, however, question the applicability of dialectical principles to all phenomena under discussion. This implicit and sometimes explicit adherence to the dialectical dogma unites them and their numerous followers in their efforts, more or less conscious, ,to destroy logocentric thinking habits in those who listen to them and to ignore those scholars who refuse to follow Hegelian and Marxist premises.

Dialectical thought is unique among the methods of contemporary thought in that it claims immunity from criticism coming from the outside and grounded in methodologies hostile to it, while reserving the right to criticize them from its own standpoint. Logic is powerless in confron- ting dialectics, and so is empirical reality. This is because what has been called reality by common sense and logocentric philosophy is, from a dialectician’s standpoint, merely a product of false consciousness engendered by social conditions. The

[Dialectical thought] is thought to the second power; an intensification of the normal thought processes such that a renewal of light washes over the object of their exasperation, as though in the midst of its immediate perplexities the mind had attempted, by willpower, by fiat, to lift itself mightily by its own bootstraps. Faced with the operative procedures of the nonreflective thinking mind . . . dialectical thought tries not so much to complete and perfect the application of such procedures as to widen its own attention to include them in its awareness as well; it aims, in other words, not so much at solving the particular dilemmas in question, as at con- verting those problems into their own solutions on a higher level, and making the fact and the existence of the problem itself the starting point for new research.’O

By Jameson’s admission, dialectical thinkers promise to solve no intellectual or practical problems, and they refuse to define their method as one more philosophical methodology. Instead, they describe it as “thought to the second power” or “thought on a higher level.” But not a shred of evidence is offered to support such assertions. Dialectical thinkers utter pronouncements rather than propose hypotheses, and thus they share with the Delphic oracle the quality of “oracularity.” Dialectical thought sets itself up above other methodologies “by willpower, by fiat,” to use Jameson’s words. Needless to say, this way of proceeding invalidates it as a scholarly methodology: a shortcoming which has not prevented its popularity in the American academy.

In Herbert Marcuse’s programmatic article, a certain fluidity of thought is said to be an important feature of dialectical thinking.” Yes merges into no and no into yes; boundaries between concepts become

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blurred. In Jameson’s words, the advan- tage of dialectical thinking over other modes of thinking lies in the opportunity it provides for

that paradoxical turning around of a phenomenon into its opposite of which the transformation of quality into quan- tity is only one of the better known manifestations. . . . It is a matter, indeed, of the reversal of limits, of the transformation from negative to positive and from positive to negative. . . . I *

This procedure may at first seem reasonable: Does not all scholarly discourse proceed by challenging what was said earlier and pointing out the mistakes of past thinking? True; but science proceeds on the assumption that logical conflicts and contradictions are impermissible and avoidable, whereas dialectical thinkers claim that these conflicts are permissible and unavoidable. As Karl Popper has observed, such “reasoning” destroys all argument and all progress.l3 The idea of the fluidity of concepts and of the pointlessness of using the categories of truth and falsity in discourse, however, ap- peals to many academics. It promises instant Besserwissenschaft, instant feeling that one has outsmarted one’s untutored neighbor who still believes in a simplistic (that is, logocentric) interpretation of events.

In dialectical discourse, thought as such, thought in the abstract, one that can be transmitted through writing to the genera- tions to come, is considered an illusion. It is replaced by specific thoughts generated by social conditions.” Concomitantly, there is no objective reality which individual consciousness partially reflects; there is only a “reality” generated by the ideology which each of us carries within himself or herself. As Jameson puts it, dialectical thought implies “a reversal of the form-dominated, artisanally derived model developed by Aristotle; here form is regarded not as the initial pattern or mold, as that from which we start, but rather as that with which we end up, as but the final articulation of the deeper logic of the content itself.”l5 Another dialectician, T. W.

Adorno, considers “formal logic, with its laws of contradiction and identity,” to be “a kind of repressive taboo.” In P7zjms he further demonstrates this disregard for logic:

Dialectics cannot, therefore, permit any insistence on logical neatness to en- croach on its right to go from one genus to another, to shed light on an object in itself hermetic by casting a glance at society, to present society with the bill which the object does not redeem. Finally, the very opposition between knowledge which penetrates from without and that which bores from within becomes suspect to the dialectical method, which sees in it a symptom of precisely that reification which the dialectic is obliged to accuse. . . . No theory, not even that which is true, is safe from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous relation to the object. Dialectics must guard against this no less than against en- thrallment in the cultural object. l6

The idea of the mythopoetic core of the imagination is rejected and replaced by the idea of a struggle for power on the one hand and the idea of purposeless mental activity (as in LCvi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked) on the other. Jameson again: “The new is to the old as latent content working its way to the surface to displace a form henceforth obsolete.”” This struggle to overcome the obsolete elements of both thought and social life cannot be understood by a logocentric thinker. It is the task of a dialectical thinker to point it out in each particular case. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has called the school of thought generated by the dialectical idea of universal struggle “the school of suspicion”: it assumes that an event cannot be understood until the meaning ascribed to it by custom and common sense is shown to be false, and an opposite meaning is ushered in and given the position of priority.

Within the framework of dialectical thinking there is no room for empirical facts. For a dialectician, facts are creations

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of an ideology-ridden mind. Logocentric thinkers use them as tools in trying to justify their world view. In Tactics and Ethics Georg Lukacs says in effect that if facts contradict the theory, so much the worse for the facts.l9 T.W. Adorno puts it even more bluntly: “We never regard the theory as simply a set of hypotheses but as in some sense standing on its own feet, and therefore did not intend to prove or disprove a theory th rough o u r findings. . . .” Theory becomes prior to the gathering of facts, and it is assumed that reality cannot be reconstructed in the mind by accumulating facts.

The following examples of Adorno’s disregard for facts are taken from a book which is currently used in an undergrad- uate course (jointly listed by the Depart- ments of Sociology and Anthropology) at a major Southern university:

But the sinister, integrated society of today no longer tolerates even those relatively independent , distinct moments to which the theory of the causal dependence of superstructure on base once referred. In the open-air prison which the world is becoming, it is no longer so important to know what depends on what, such is the extent to which everything is one. . . . Cultural traditionalism [of Western societies] and the terror of the new Russian despots are in basic agreement.eo

In academic teaching this professed contempt for facts goes hand in hand with a decline of survey courses in the humanities. The dialecticians at our universities are in- variably opposed to surveys of literature, “straight history” courses, the Great Books courses. The Harvard “core curriculum” introduced a few years ago illustrates this point. In vain would one look in there for an unpretentious “History of Western Civilization from , . . to , . .” course, or a monograph course on Homer or Dante or Dickens or Dostoevsky. Instead, “problem” courses abound. In these courses students are taught “how to think” rather than “what happened.” This new direction is taken because by their very arrangement

surveys teach a logocentric vision of reality. From a dialectician’s standpoint, the stan- dard fare of surveys-historical and literary facts-merely expresses an ideology which the dialectical discourse considers obsolete. If students were taught facts as handed down by textbooks of philosophy, history, and literature written by traditional thinkers, they would receive reinforcements of the ideologies which brought these textbooks to existence. A dialectician will opt instead for courses on “interpretation,” which de-emphasize the idea of historical continuity and tradition, and subject to vigorous dialectical reinter- pretation disconnected snippets of philosophical, historical, and literary texts.

Rejection of historical facts and empirical evidence is accompanied by a rejection of the autonomy of the thinking subject. Tutored or untutored, we have all been so remade by capitalist society that our own commonsensical judgment is not to be trusted. “The decline of the individual in the mechanized working process of modern civilization” makes personal judgments invalid, according to a prominent dialectician and former sociology professor a t Berkeley, Leo Lowenthal.21 T. w. Adorno and M. Horkheimer declare that “The most intimate reactions of human be- ings have been so reified [in modem society] that the idea of anything specific to themselves persists only as an utterly abstract notion. . . .“22 And Jameson knows that “thought asphyxiates in our culture, with its absolute inability to imag- ine anything other than what it is.”23 In a subsequent book he briefly mentions the kind of culture in which thought will not asphyxiate.

Structuralism may be understood as a distorted awareness of the dawning col- lective character of lqe, as a kind of blurred reflection of the already collec- tive structure of what is perhaps less the cybernetic than the mass production commercial network into which our individual existences are organized.“

The sophisticated Western dialecticians are closer to their unsophisticated Soviet

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colleagues than might at first appear. I do not see major differences between their understanding of dialectic and the definition of it provided by Josif Dzugashvili, better known as Josef Stalin. In Dialectical and Historical Matenulism (1938), Stalin streamlined the dialectical method to four essential principles: 1. all phenomena in n a t u r e a re in te r - l inked a n d no phenomenon can be understood in isola- tion from others; 2. everything in nature is in a state of continuous change; 3. quan- titative changes eventually produce qualitative changes; and 4. all phenomena contain internal contradictions, and development and progress involve conflict between these contradiction^.'^ Stalin also noted that the contrary of dialectics is “metaphysics”; i. e. , logocentrism: an observation that later reappeared in Jac- ques Derrida.

Let us now consider instances of practical application of these theories. In a book published in 1979 by Yale University Press, Paul de Man makes a further contribution to the deconstruction of what he calls “the organic model of the universe.” He writes about Nietzsche. Before attemp- ting to deconstruct this great proto- deconstructionist, however, he stakes his ground: “Romanticism itself is generally understood as the passage to a genetic concept of art and literature, from a Platonic to a Hegelian model of the universe.’IP6 He then bemoans the fact that while Roman- ticism itself meant a shift from Platonism to Hegelianism, i. e . , to dialectical understanding of history and art, some twentieth-century scholars who write of it are still in a “pre-Hegelian stage”: “The tradition is caught in a non-dialectical notion of a subject-object dichotomy, reveal- ing a more or less deliberate avoidance of the moment of negation that coincides, for Hegel, with the emergence of a true Sub- j e ~ t . ” ~ ’ De Man looks forward to the “un- doing” of the logocentric system of thought that “puts a natural, organic principle at the center of things and constructs a series of analogical emanations around this center.’’ An un-Hegelian critic is for de Man someone who is either unintelligent or

wastefully obstinate. The dialectical model of the universe is here treated not as a hypothesis but as a Hegel-given truth to which all those who desire to be considered intellectually respectable should subscribe.

De Man’s remarks are symptomatic of the split into the two languages, dialectical and logocentric, of which I spoke at the beginning of this essay and which prevails in American humanistic scholarship today. A major consequence of this split is that in academic circles books are now criticized not for their content but for their methodology. While methodological disputes are both inevitable and ap- propriate in academic criticism, their hypertrophy diverts scholarly energies from the problems themselves to their articulation.

I have singled out de Man not because he is original but because he is symptomatic. He occupies a prominent place in American literary scholarship and is followed by hundreds of less prominent scholars and teachers who distribute the Hegel-given truths in the classroom. De Man’s arcane theorizing may seem in- significant to those who believe in the con- spiracy theory or the KGB infiltration of our universities. I submit (in a logocentric fashion) that ideas have consequences, and that writings such as de Man’s perform ef- fectively the same job which in the Soviet Union is assigned to Party propagandists. De Man assumes that, within Western culture, the organic model of the universe had long ago been rejected (rather than merely updated, as a logocentric thinker might say) by the intellectual leaders of that culture. However, the social and political structures of Western societies de- pend on the logocentric model now just as they did in the past. An ancient Greek democracy, the Middle Ages, the Refor- mation, and twentieth-century America can “communicate” with one another through books and other cultural products, precisely because they all share the principles of logocentric thinking. The dialectical idea that all natural and human events embody two opposite and warring principles (both of which are equally

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“good’ and necessary) undermines this communication and with it the ability to judge social and political events, to assign value to them, and to draw conclusions on the basis of these judgments and assignments. The dialectical dogma planted in the minds of those of little learn- ing, i. e . , college students, encourages relativism of ideas and means in social, political, and cultural life. It makes students and scholars indifferent or hostile to the fundamental assumptions of the culture to which they owe both intellectual sustenance and physical survival.

Unlike de Man, who considers himself a post-Hegelian, Fredric Jarneson professes his allegiance to Marxism. He is a professor of French at Yale University and he “does” literary criticism; however, his concerns go far beyond the interpretation of literary texts. Like many other interpreters of literature in the 1970s and 1980s, he considers literary criticism to be one of the few areas where thought (which “asphyxiates in our culture”) can “keep alive the idea of a concrete future.” (As previously quoted, this future is supposed to be collectivist.)

Jameson is much less subtle than de Man. Rather than merely deploring the undialectical treatment of the subject- object dichotomy, he directly attacks the fundamental assumptions of Western culture. However, he does it in a manner that is quite different from the crude attacks of Soviet Marxists. The latter com- plain of the growing misery of the working classes under capitalism, and they hold that the proletariat and the Party are the mainsprings of the revolution. The revisionist Marxists in the West long ago discarded the idea of the revolutionary role of the proletariat, as well as the empirically false thesis of the growing misery of workers under capitalism: instead, they maintain that in the forefront of revolutionary struggle stand the intellectual leaders of society. Jameson is a spokesman for such ideas. He tells us that the diseases from which we suffer are hidden from an untrained eye; only those who think dialec- tically can recognize and diagnose them: “The works of culture come to us as signs in

an all-but-forgotten code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even recognized as such, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost the organs to see.”e* Jameson speaks of the entanglement of traditional historiography in “that very socio- economic situation which it was one of the deeper functions of ‘ideology’ to conceal in the first place.” When he inveighs against another literary critic, Wayne Booth, he accuses him not of faulty arguments but of following the standards of American culture. “In Booths writings,” he says ac- cusingly, one sees “a scarcely veiled defense of middle class norms.” In other words, our society is mortally ill, but we do not recognize this illness; indeed, our “doctors” (the traditional historiographers) are busy concealing from us the fact that we are ill. They may do so unconsciously, but that is beside the point. What is important is that they serve the disease rather than diagnos- ing and curing it. Literary criticism is one of the few fields in which our secret il- lnesses can be diagnosed and discussed: “May it prove equal to the task!” exclaims Jameson at the end of Marxism and Form (1 971).

Jameson differs from his Soviet colleagues in that he says that the ideology and the culture of capitalism conceal rather than reflect the exploitation of the many by the few. But he agrees with them in that he views capitalist society as in- tolerably oppressive. One of the manifestations of this oppressiveness is the im- possibility of creating perfect works of art under capitalism. Jameson contends that American society now lives in the last stage of capitalism and that under such conditions perfect works of art cannot as yet come into being. In Principles of Literary Theory (196S), his Soviet colleague, L.A. Timofeev, explains why: socialist realism, which is the ultimate method of artistic creation, cannot exist in a capitalist society. It comes into being only after the socialist revolution. The revolution provides art with “totally new historical material” which is a sine qua non of a perfect work of art.Zg The American Slavicist E.J. Brown sees the theory of

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socialist realism as a product of Stalinist mentality.s0 Jameson would probably pro- test against an intimation of a link with Stalinism, as would other Western Marxists for whom the word Stalinism is an anathema. However, if one subscribes to the logocentric proposition that ideas have consequences, the difference between Jameson and Timofeev appears to be one of refinement rather than of principle.

Jameson is easily recognizable as a dialectician; indeed he tells us so time and again. But some major interpreters of culture are not so easily identifiable as followers of dialectical principles. They ex- plore the obscure aspects of Marxism such as “the dialectics of superstructures.” The work of Claude LCvi-Strauss is a case in point.

LCvi-Strauss’s interpretation of the South American myths in The Raw and the Cooked (1964) is motivated by what he elsewhere described as a desire to con- tribute to that theory of superstructures which Marx barely sketches out. In Marxist political theory, culture is said to grow out of the economic base of society and to be dependent on it. Marx wrote little about this “superstructure,” but Soviet Marxists seized upon this concept and made all culture, including religion but excluding language, into a product of the economic base. Western Marxists, Claude LCvi- Strauss among them, bypassed the idea of direct dependence and instead spoke of various mediatory processes between economic base and cultural superstructure. Ltvi-Strauss sees his own contribution to cultural theory along these lines. He rejects the centuries-old interpretation of myths as either metaphors of spiritual life or primitive versions of a world view. There is purposelessness in myths, he contends: myths do not deal with human relation- ships or with man’s relation to nature or to divinity but merely exercise his urge to create structures. Myths have no center and no hidden unity; they consist of in- tricate chains of conjunctions and disjunc- tions; they are a language rather than a message. They express ingenuity of the human mind at that stage of civilization

when this ingenuity could not be applied to a better purpose.

LCvi-Strauss denies logocentric inspira- tion, originating either in the mind or in reality, to the structure of myths; he sees a significant segment of human culture as saying less than the traditional interpreters have said it says. That, of course, does not yet make him a dialectician. What does is a combination of topic and interpretation. Myths originated in the ancient world of communal property in which, according to Marxist political theory, no class conflicts existed; therefore culture could not reflect them. In that period, cultural activity reflected the lack of class tensions and class struggle. Hence it appears to us to be “purposeless.” It reflects the creative ability of the human mind, and it shows the mind to be an engine which is already running but does not as yet work to destroy the outmod- ed system of production and usher in a new and more advanced system.

LCvi-Strauss’s interpretation of the myth-producing activity is the only possible one within the Marxist framework. Since myths originated in the pre-slavery period, they either reflect a vague intimation of logocentric beginning or are what LCvi- Strauss has realized his wish to con- tributing to the Marxist theory of superstructures: he has provided a Marxist explanation for that segment of human culture which had not yet been accounted for by other Marxist thinkers.

The British phenomenologist Philip Pet- tit has argued that Ltvi-Strauss’s method of myth analysis is not falsifiable and thus not scientific. It implies that one analysis is as good as another as long as it shows some symmetries within the myth in question. No objective criteria exist that could restrain the imagination of an analyst: “any two myths could be presented as transformations or versions of one ano the r . ” s1 Pe t t i t a rgues tha t LCvi-Strauss’s methodology is fanciful rather than scientific, but he does not further define in what this fancifulness consists. I submit that it is a product of dialectical thinking. LCvi-Straws’s work is one of the large-scale a t t empt s of the

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sophisticated Western Marxists to persuade the scholarly community that neither spiritual nor rational forces played a role in the conception a n d . execution of mythological stories.

On a much lower level of abstraction and dialectical sophistication is the work of the literary theorist Georg Lukics. His Studies in European Realism, written in Moscow in the 1930s, acquired popularity on American campuses after World War 11. In this book Lukdcs critiques the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy. He assumes that there exist direct correspondences between the stage of capitalist development of a country and its literature, i . e. , between the country’s economic base and its superstructure. He draws conclusions about the motivation of characters and the meaning of novels on the basis of the alleged contradictions of capitalism which a country displayed in the course of a writer’s life. The “stages of capitalism” theory accounts in Lukics’s book for Tolstoy’s superiority to Flaubert and Balzac, as well as for the alleged subject matter of Tolstoy’s books: the Russian peasant.

Let us first consider Lukics’s placing of the three great novelists in nineteenth- century tradition and his thesis about Tolstoy’s superiority to his Western Euro- pean colleagues. Why could they not become as great as he? Lukics has an answer:

The evolution of bourgeois society after 1848 destroyed the subjective conditions which make a g rea t real ism possible. . . . The really honest and gifted bourgeois writers who lived and wrote [after 18481 could not experience and share the development of their class with the same true devotion and intensi- ty of feeling as their predecessors. . . . They remained mere spectators of the social process. . . .32

society, and therefore he became a better writer.

Here the deterministic method of using the “stages of capita1ism”as indicators of the goodness of writers is displayed in all its crude glory. This is oracular criticism at its fiercest, because under the guise of interpretation it makes pronouncements and offers judgments about literature instead of arguing and reasoning. But in addition to the determinism (unjustified in any case), Lukics seems to be quite wrong from the empirical standpoint. His Marxist dogma requires of “bourgeois” writers to become alienated and ineffective in the advanced stage of capitalism that Western countries reached in the nineteenth century. In fact, quite the opposite happened. The integra- tion of writer and society has never been more complete than in the nineteenth century, with the exception perhaps of ancient societies where the art of writing was bound to religion on the one hand and to political power on the other. Except for these two cases, during most of human history writers played a minor role in society and were classed together with servants and entertainers. They commanded neither general respect nor attention, and their influence on society was minimal. But in the nineteenth century, precisely at the time when Lukics claims they became “alienated” and could not “identify” with their societies, writers ceased to be treated as inconsequential entertainers and began to participate in a society’s life in a major way. They became spokesmen for society and gained the attention and respect of a continuously growing number of readers. For the first time in history they could make a living not by serving a rich sponsor but through the support of a significant number of ordinary people. In short, Lukics’s thesis that Tolstoy was better integrated into Russian society than were Flaubert and Balzac into French society appears to be false.

Another act of dialectical acrobatics is performed in regard to the subject matter of Tolstoy’s novels. Lukics maintained that Tolstoy wrote novels about peasants and not about landowners and that he

Not so Leo Tolstoy. He did not become alienated because in Russia capitalism had not yet reached an advanced stage of development. Thus Tolstoy was able to participate more fully in the life of his

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showed the inexorable division between the two nations in Russia: peasants and landowners. For the readers of Tolstoy who might be surprised by these statements about Tolstoy’s themes, Lukics offers the following explanation. It may seem that Tolstoy writes about landowners, but in fact he writes about peasants. An example is Tolstoy’s description of the nobleman Nekhlyudov in Resurrection:

Such descriptions, which we find in great numbers in Tolstoy’s writings, of course also contain many details. But these details are not meant to throw light on the specific qualities of the ob- jects described [i. e . , on Nekhlyudov], but to stress the social implications which determine the use of such sub- jects. And the social implications point to exploitations, the exploitation of the peasants by the landowner^.^^

In one sweeping statement Lukics reassures us that he knows what Tolstoy “meant” and what are the determinants and the implications of writing about landowners. The dialectical newspeak thus enables Lukics to “know” what is on the writer’s mind and what is the meaning of his work even before an analysis has been attempted.

The grotesque aspect of dialectical methodology becomes even more apparent as one proceeds to Lukics’s description of Tolstoy’s characters. Lukics deals mainly with those characters who seem dissatisfied or disappointed by life; those who are successful and happy are easily dismissed. The characters’ misfortunes are attributed to the limitations imposed on them by capitalism. Thus Alexey Karenin in Anna Karenina is said to represent a typical official in capitalist society, narrow-minded and emotionally and intellectually stultified. Karenin’s brother-in-law, Stiva Oblonsky , that weak-willed, impulsive, and carefree individual, an embodiment of human weakness who was as readily understood in Tsarist Russia as he is in modern America, is said to embody an advanced stage of capitalist development. He lives off a sinecure, and this fact, according

to Lukdcs, makes him represent a particularly nasty element of capitalism. Never mind that the word sinecure originated in ancient Rome.

In War and Peace the senior and junior Bolkonskys are misfits, and Lukics finds a ready explanation for it. The old Bolkon- sky’s retirement to his estate is said to be brought about by his disappointment with the onset of capitalism. His son’s failure to accept life is attributed to the rigidity of Russian social structure under the Tsars. (It is never explained why others fared SO

well under the same conditions.) The short story “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” which consists of a description of the illness and death of a middle-level Tsarist official, is said to depict the rigid division of labor in Russian capitalism. Ivan Ilych is a bureaucrat in an emerging capitalist society, and he treats people as pieces of machinery, as means of production. And his doctor eventually begins to treat him in the same way. Moral: the capitalist system is the guilty party.

My favorite explanation, however, is offered apropos of The Kreutzer Sonata, a deeply pessimistic novel in which the problems of evil and sexuality are of central interest. In it a man named Pozdnyshev (Too-late is an approximate translation of his name) kills his wife in a fit of jealousy and then inveighs against sex and the human condition. Pozdnyshev’s belated discovery of the onerous burden of marital charity is the very stuff of tragedy, and Tolstoy treats it so. But for Lukics The Kreutzer Sonata represents the degenera- tion of love and marriage brought about by capitalism.

Lukics’s book has enjoyed several American editions. In the Preface to the Universal Library edition, Alfred Kazin praises Lukics for his insights. Another noted scholar calls him a “traditional h~manist .”~‘ Portions of the book have been anthologized: e.g. , Lukics’s remarks on War and Peace and on Anna Karenina have been included in the Norton editions of these novels, which have been widely used in the classroom. Finally, I am not aware of any major attempt in the scholar-

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ly press to contest LukAcs’s “contribution” to the study of nineteenth-century realism in literature.

That this sort of nonsense is taken seriously at American universities; that it is well received at scores of professional meetings; and that it continues to be taught to hundreds of thousands of students: these facts have not yet ceased to amaze me. It would seem that the adoles- cent discoveries of dialectical thinking- that there is no history without interpretation, that words are mediators rather than translucent screens, that we are in- fluenced by social conditions - should be appropriately mocked when they are elevated to the notion of first principles. But nothing of the sort has happened. One has to look back to the nineteenth century to find eloquent repudiations of dialectical thinking and its first major champion, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Swen Kierkegaard called Hegelianism “a brilliant spirit of putridity” and “the most repugnant of all forms of looseness,” ex- uding “an infamous splendour of corrup- tion.’Ia5 Arthur Schopenhauer was even more outspoken:

On Hegel alone, however, I have without commentary passed my un- qualified condemnation in the most em- phatic terms. For I am convinced that he not only lacks all philosophical merit, but has had on philosophy, and thus on German literature generally, an extremely pernicious, really stupefying, one might say pestilential, influence. It is therefore the duty of everyone capable of so doing to act against such influence, even to think and decide against it, emphatically and at every opportunity. For if we are going to maintain silence, who then is to speak up? . . . the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme of laughter at times. . . . it is a pseudo- philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of

language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage. . . . this pseudo- philosophy has as its central idea an ab- surd notion grasped from thin air [and] it dispenses with reason and conse- quents. . . .36 In recent times only Karl Popper has

matched the vitriol of this attack. He view- ed Hegelian dialectic “with a mixture of contempt and horror,” and he discouraged his readers “from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously.” His generalized accusation is even more shat- tering:

Hegel’s argument (which admittedly re- quired of him a certain degree of subtle- ty, though not more than a great philosopher might be expected to possess) was full of logical mistakes and of tricks, presented with pretentious im- pressiveness. This undermined and eventually lowered the traditional standards of intellectual responsibility and honesty. It also contributed to the rise of totalitarian philosophizing and, even more senbus, to the lack of any deter- mined intellectual resistance to it. 5 7

The lack of intellectual resistance to dialectical philosophizing is particularly obvious on American campuses which have been virtually monopolized by Marxist dialecticians during the last two decades. The ubiquity of dialectical methodologies has recently been commented upon the noted Slavicist Max Hayward. He was speaking of differences between Westerners and Russophiles, or the two groups of Russian intellectuals which developed in the 1840s and inspired all subsequent intellectual trends in Russia. In the nineteenth century, when members of both groups traveled to the West in search of ideas for improving society, said Hayward, they encountered there a variety of social and cultural currents among which they could choose. When emigres from Russia arrive in the West today, they find that Western discourse about society is

20 Winter 1984


dominated by the same Marxist dogma syllogisti-cally and arguing as clearly and which they tried to escape: precisely as possible; instead, it offers

“thought to the second power.” In trying to The West now has little to offer . . . but undo the logocentric model of the

forms Of Marxism which destroy a civilization while holding forth a

relevant to people who have seen how world. Dialectical thought took over the such things work in pract i~e.~8

In the form in which they now exist on American academy at a time when, from a Amer ican campuses , d i a l ec t i ca l logocentric point of view, evidence of its methodologies help to legitimize Marxism disastrous practical consequences has in the academy without ever pronouncing become virtually irrefutable. While on the the word. They foster the fatal foolishness empirical level Hegelian and Marxist of forgetting that yes means yes and no philosophizing has been discredited, on the means no, and that no amount of prattle level of abstract thinking, in American that no is the undercurrent of yes and vice classrooms and in scholarly journals, it has versa will make anyone wiser or better able continued to thrive. Thus we witness a to cope with life. Dialectical criticism of curious phenomenon. Statements about literature manipulates language rather the evidence of the empirical failure of than communicates. It says less than dialectical thinking are logocentric language can say. It takes us in effect to a statements; they are grounded in the ac- more primitive stage of civilization, when ceptance of logic and experience as ir- concepts were opaque, when language had replaceable fundamentals of discourse. not yet congealed into a tool of com- These empirical and logical premises are munication, when truth was nonrepresen- now under attack, not in the streets but in tational and only “the forces of history” the classrooms and in academic scholar- mattered. The capacity for clear-cut ship. While hiding under the bushel of distinctions, even though laced with the post-structuralism, deconstruction, or awareness of an inevitable current of im- simply hermeneut ics , d ia lec t ica l precision, is the foundation of civilized methodologies continue their job of selling discourse. Dialectical thinking discourages fried snowballs, and the American students and teachers from thinking academic establishment keeps on buying.

various degraded (Or universe, dialectical thinking works to

neither nor Seem particularly vague promise of the brave noncapitalist

IEwa M. Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). ‘Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 39. ’Karl Popper, The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, vol. 2 of The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 369-96. ‘Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 6-56. SFully to substantiate this point would require a paper that would be several times longer than the present one. Rather than not annotating this matter at all, I have selected some shorthand examples: Emanuel Sweden- borg’s mystical analogies in Heaven and Hell; Saint Thomas’s rationalist philosophy; Kant’s moral theory; the Western concept of law as applicable to all in the same way; symbolism as a literary movement; the methodology of the exact sciences. For more elabora-

tion on some of these, see I. Bochenski, The Methods of Contemporary Thought, 2nd ed. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1965). 7acques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). pp. 247-64. See also Derrida. “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Dqference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 251-77. ‘David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroads, 1981), pp. 420-25. ‘Ricoeur, pp. 29-30. gDenis Donoghue, Ferocious Alphabets (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1981), p. 98. IOFredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 307. “Herbert Marcuse, “Dialectics,” in Marxism, Communism and Western Society, vol. 2 , ed. C.D. Kernig (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). p. 413. l‘Marxism and Form, p. 309. ISPopper, Open Society, vol. 2 , p. 39.

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I'Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), p. 47. lsMarxism and Form, pp. 328-29. 16T.W. Adorno, Prisms, tr. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 198l), p. 33. "Marxism and Form, p. 327. 18Ricoeur, pp. 32-35. 'OGeorg Lukics, Tactics and Ethics: Political Essays 1919-1929 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). p. 4. zopriSms, pp. 34, 28. "Leo Lowen- thal, Literature, Popuhr Culture and Society (Palo Alto, California: Pacific Books, 1961), p. 10. "Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1972), p. 167. z'Marxism and Form, p. 416. "Fredric Jameson. Aison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 196. My italics. *9losef Stalin, Dialectical and Histonkal Materialism (New York: International Publishers, 1940), pp. 6-11. '6Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural

Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and &oust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 79. "Ibid., p. 80. "Marxism and Form, p. 416. '9L.A. Timofeev, Osnovy teoriz literatury (Moscow: Gos. Pedagogicheskoe Izd., 1963), pp. 397-98. 30E.J. Brown, Russian Literature Since the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 15. SIPettit, p. 90. "Georg Lukdcs, Studies in European Realism, Universal Library (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), pp. 140-41. 3sIbid., p. 146. )*Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). p. 1. gbQuoted from Popper , p . 275. "Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality (In- dianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 14-15. "Pop- per, p. 395. My italics. a8Max Hayward, Writers in Russia: 1917-1978 (New York: Harcourt. 1983), p. 302.

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