The War Against Marxism by Tony McKenna;

Author:Tony McKenna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Chapter 5

Literary Theory and the loss of the historical totality

Literary Theory is almost as old as ancient Greek philosophy itself and goes back to Aristotle at least where, in his Poetics, he formulated aesthetic principles of comedy and tragedy. In the twentieth century, however – co-extensive with the rise of universities and the type of education which would facilitate a wider demographic than the elite bastions of old – the shape and contours of a new type of Literary Theory began to attain definition. It drew sustenance from the Russian formalism which developed in the context of the 1917 revolution, but perhaps the strongest impetus to modern-day Literary Theory came from the structuralist linguistics of the 1950s (influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure) and the structuralist anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, along with their post-structuralist and post-modernist successors such as Derrida and Bathes, and also the increasingly fashionable psychoanalytic theory of figures like Freud and Lacan.1

This threadbare summary might briefly be supplemented by pointing out that Literary Theory and its components were often evolved out of the need to destroy the ‘grand narrative’, the type of theories which tried to form a totalizing and coherent picture of the historical process as a whole, with its own necessary and immanent logic, and to draw political and aesthetic conclusions within the light of that overarching ‘objectivist’ framework. In the febrile environment of the early seventies, as the Civil Rights movements went into retreat, as neoliberalism secured its first substantial foothold in the bloody laboratory of Chile, and as the beginnings of a great and sweeping process of de-industrialization set in across the First World countries, the sense of radical political possibility felt increasingly illusory. Where once the clash of classes and the struggle for revolution held sway, now such living social categories had been supplanted in favour of a strange and eerie terrain in which reality was ‘decentred’, causes had become ‘absent’, and ‘signifiers’, rather mysteriously, tended to ‘float’.

A more detailed analysis of Literary Theory is beyond the scope of this chapter, but what I want to look at here is how two thinkers who locate themselves in the Marxist tradition have sought to fuse Marxism with some of the main strands of Literary Theory. In so doing they have managed to propel themselves into incredibly prominent positions as celebrity intellectuals who sell millions of books and are invited to make speeches across the globe. I want to examine these thinkers as a way of demonstrating how the trends they mobilize in Literary Theory are, in fact, anti-Marxist. Again I am not trying to give an assessment of these thinkers as a whole; I do not propose to provide an overview of their body of work and their place in Literary Theory more broadly – something I am less than qualified to do.

What I aim to achieve is to once more focus on that very specific question of class and its role in the Marxist theory of history: how – in adopting some of the

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