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These are the contradictions in the historical reality of Verne’s times. By a standard Machereyan reading, the first step is to grasp Verne’s representations of the bourgeois ideology: first, in Verne’s works “the conquest of nature by industry…is an identifiable ideological theme…Man’s domination of nature [with industry]…is Verne’s elementary obsession” (165-6, italics mine); secondly, the journey that moves forward is another ideological theme of progress (188).
As Macherey points out, Verne has implanted these ideological representations into his writing project, in the course of which “ideology undergoes a complete modification” (194). And it is this modification that makes possible the narrative ruptures in Verne’s works. Regarding the theme of the industrial conquest, here is the truth: “nature is prepared for the adventure of its transformation, and man only lives this adventure on condition that he too must lend himself to this movement which he imposes in so far as he accepts and receives it at the same time” (181). In other words, this is what Verne has left unsaid at this point: while Verne thinks he has presented a theme of industrial conquest, it is actually a theme of preparation and transformation. As for the theme of progress, this journey aims to explore, which “is to follow, that is to say, to cover once again, under new
conditions, a road actually traveled” (189). That is, the following is what Verne has left unsaid:
“Verne wants to represent a forward movement, but in fact figures a movement backwards,” namely,
“the history of a return” or “a regression” (189-90). In a nutshell, “Verne belongs to the progressive lineage of the bourgeois: his work proclaims that nothing can escape man, that even the world, even its most distant part, is like an object in his hand…” (Barthes, Mythologies, 65 ).F14F From this
position, he composes his works and inevitably leaves these things unsaid.
II. Situate Macherey Genealogically in Terms of Ideology
In fact, an academically fruitful discussion of Macherey will have to include the explorations of the term “ideology,” now that Macherey’s whole said/unsaid model is entirely premised on it. It
14 As a matter of fact, in A Theory of Literary Production, Macherey first cites Barthes to help ascertain Verne’s bourgeois position. Then he continues to quote, “Verne had an obsession for plenitude: he never stopped putting a last touch to the world and furnishing it, making it full with an egg-like fullness. His tendency is exactly that of an eighteenth-century Encyclopaedist or of a Dutch painter: the world is finite, the world is full of numerous and continuous objects,” on which Macherey comments, “This notion of enclosure is obviously interesting as it relates to the representation of the cosmos as interiority, as the space of an intimacy, the very notion against which science was obliged to struggle at the beginnings of its modern period.” See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans by Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957) 65, Macherey, 167.
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is common knowledge of Marxism that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The German Ideology, think of ideology as “the ruling ideas,” or “the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance” (67).
Namely, ideology is an instrument of domination. Of course, as the years have gone by, this simple definition has undergone quite a few alterations. Still, not all major theorists, or even post-Marxists, fancy using this term. Raymond Williams, for instance, views this word with suspicion because ideology is constrained by basic tendency “to limit processes of meaning and valuation to formed, separable “ideas” or “theories” and then to treat these as purely derivative of some supposedly more basic reality (sensation, ‘practical consciousness,’ ‘material social process’ )…” (Marxism and
Literature, 70). For Williams, using the term ‘ideology’ will exclude these processes, which is
utterly unacceptable. Michel Foucault shares a similar suspicion, thinking that ideology always stands “in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as “truth”;” it is an obstacle to his analysis which aims to bracket out the true/false opposition in favor of studying truth as an effect produced within discourse (Power/Knowledge, 118).F15F Even so, Michael Moriarty, in“Ideology and Literature,” has asserted that “the term ‘ideology’ will remain useful to literary studies precisely because of its vagueness, or flexibility” (54). Indeed, in (post-)Marxism ideology is such a big word that its various conceptions have literally constituted a massive theoretical system, to which several prominent (post-)Marxists have contributed. Now, in order to consolidate my theoretical framework and add more richness to it, it is essential that I should look into
Macherey’s relevancy to these (post-)Marxists. To be more precise, I shall examine how Macherey’s thesis on narrative ruptures has threaded through these (post-)Marxists’ theorizations.
First, I shall begin my discussion of ideology with this quotation, “As for Marx, one accepted the emphases on history, on change, on the inevitably close relationships between class and culture, but the way this came through was, at another level, unacceptable” (Eagleton and Wicker, From
15 Slavoj Zizek, on the other hand, does use the term ‘ideology.’ However, he doesn’t apply it to literary interpretations, at least not to a significant extent. He is more interested in locating the concept of ideology in relation to other
theoretical discourses, such as psychoanalysis. See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) p11-53.
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Culture to Revolution, 28). Terry Eagleton, in Criticism and Ideology, adds an explanation to this
quote, “This closing formulation is curious: no one, surely, ever took the base/superstructure distinction to be a matter of experience” (22). Indeed, for Eagleton as well as Wicker, classical Marxist theorizations, more or less, run the risk of being out of touch with people’s lived experiences.16F This is a perfect point of departure in understanding Louis Althusser’s so-called“ideology,” for Althusser thinks of ideology as “the sphere in which I ‘live’ or experience my relationship to” the conditions of my existence. And “it is my imaginary relationship” (Moriarty, 44):
…[Ideology is] the lived' relation between men and the world, including History (in political action or inaction), passes through ideology, or better, is ideology itself…So ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world…In ideology men do indeed express…the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real relation and an 'imaginary ', 'lived ' relation. Ideology, then, is the expression of the relation between men and their 'world'…(For Marx, 233, italics mine)
If classical Marxism is accused of being ignorant of people’s lived experiences, then Althusser’s conception of ideology could be his way to redress this weakness, for he characterizes ideology as an expression of “an imaginary, lived relation between men and their world.” In a way, the former has made the latter seemly palpable. I say ‘seemly’ because we should not forget that according to Althusser, ideology actually signifies an imaginary relationship, which means that our perceptions of our existence through ideology are nothing but figments of our imagination. Here, ideology can be correlated with Lacan’s concept of “mirror image,” at the stage of which the infant
(mis)recognizes its mirror image as itself. While the individual may be irrational and contradictory, his or her mirror image is stable and coherent (Myers, “On Her Majesty’s Ideological State
Apparatus,” 151), for it is an imaginary (mis)recognition, just like ideology. Because ideology is
16 In The Construction of Social Reality, John R. Searle uses the term “observer-relative” to account for the gap between theories and social phenomena. For Searle, the world is full of a variety of objects with individual material properties, which are only relative to observers. From this viewpoint, people lived surrounded by various objects and phenomena, and their views on them vary respectively. This is their subjective lived experience. And that’s why it is difficult to grasp theoretically. See John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995) p10.
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imaginary in essence, it can be an instrument of manipulation. Althusser argues for this point from a perspective of historical materialism:17F
I shall say that the reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class “in words.” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” 132-3)
With regard to the quoted passage, Myers gives such an explanation:
First, the existing relations of production must be reproduced. Concrete human beings must be told…what is expected of them;; what they must and must not do.
Second…a transformation of the existing relations of production must be guarded against. Political actors of all kinds must be brought to believe that alternative forms of social life are either unrealistic or illegitimate. (150-1)
It is the Althusserian view of the purpose of ideology. It is redolent of historical materialism because Althusser binds ideology with relations of production. In brief, Althusser contends that ideology serves the function of reproducing and guarding existing relations of production. And to do so, workers must be told what is expected of them, or to be more precise, what they should and should not do. This is exactly the aim of the ruling ideology: to lure people into exploitation and repression, and to lead them to believe that their life granted by the ruling class/capitalists is flawless.
Based on this conception of ideology, Althusser proffers the notion of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), which includes “schools, the family, religions and religious institutions, and the mass media.” They operate primarily by ideology, inculcating “children and adults with specific
17 G. A. Cohen, in Karl Marx’s Theory of History, suggests that the line of thinking of historical materialism always runs from productive forces to social relations. Besides, George Comninel argues in Rethinking the French Revolution that the explanatory framework of historical materialism can perfectly account for the outbreak of the French
Revolution. The French Revolution became an inevitability by virtue of the antagonism between those directly responsible for social productions and those capable of expropriating surplus goods. See G. A. Cohen, in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p134. George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution (New York: Verso, 1987), p166-7.
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ways of imagining － thinking about and thus understand － their places within and relationships to the societies.” Existing along with the ISA is the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA). The RSA monopolizes the means of force in capitalist societies (ie, the army, the police, etc.); it aims to repress any threat to capitalist class structures (Wolff, “Ideological State Apparatuses,
Consumerism, and U.S. Capitalism,” 225). One of the major tasks of the ISA is to “interpellate” or subjectivize individuals:
Modern capitalism presses its ISAs to interpellate and thus to subjectivize/identify individuals in those particular ways that will provide the ideological conditions of existence for capitalist exploitation ISAs serve capitalism insofar as they effectively interpellate subjects within meaning systems (including definitions of their own and others’ identities) that make them at least accept and at best celebrate capitalist exploitation. (Wolff, 226)
In this context of the ISA, interpellation should be equated with subjectivization; individuals, if interpellated, are thus constituted as ‘free subjects’ and ‘freely’ recognize the ideology as the only truth (Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 281). That is, when an individual is interpellated, (s)he becomes subjectivized, or is socially given his or her subjectivity. Thus, through the agency of the ISA, individuals must participate in the process of interpellation of their own volition; that is, they must embrace their socially-imposed subjectivities freely. In this respect, “Althusser was, in effect, urging Marxists to correct their past overattention to and emphasis on the state by means of an equivalently serious and sustained attention to the workings of ISAs” (Wolff, 226). For
Althusser, compared with the vague concept of the state, the ISA can better enable us to understand why we are constantly under capitalists’ control.
Yet, no discussion of Althusser’s ISA would be thorough without investigating his other two key concepts: “contradiction” and “overdetermination.” For Althusser, the workings of the
ideological conditions always encounter social contradictions, such as the oppositional struggles of exploited classes. Above all, “the social contradictions working on the ISAs provoke the formation of different and oppositional conceptions of subjectivity that complicate how the ISAs actually
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function” (Wolff, 225-6).
As for Althusser’s so-called “overdetermination,” it is a term borrowed from Freud, and it is also Althusser’s major corrective to the economic determinism of classical Marxism. Classical Marxists believe the base/superstructure must be mechanically causal. Namely, the superstructure must be a mechanical reflection of the base/economic structure. Althusser regards this notion as a fallacy that needs to be corrected, and he does so by supplanting it with his notion of “structural causality:” “a structure is always more than the sum of its parts,” for there are always relations among its elements (Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx, 66-7). If so, then the superstructure can’t possibly correspond to the base structure only. It has to be “overdetermined;” that is, it must be under multiple influences, including the complex relations of its own components. Dowling gives an interesting comparison:
On such a view the heart will correspond to the Economy…If my heart stops beating one minute from now, it will only be a few more moments until my body as a total system shuts down as well, until my lungs cease to function, my liver and kidneys to work, and son on…What Althusserian overdetermination asks us to see is that this also works in reverse…the function of my lungs is equally necessary to my
heartbeat…that the simultaneous function of my lungs and heart is necessary to my kidney function…(68-9)
To sum up, the Althusserian concept of overdetermination enables us to see a synergistic or
intercorrelated network of influences rather than a one-way determining process classical Marxism propounds. It also indicates “the relative autonomy” of the superstructure. The superstructure is not unconditionally determined by the base structure; the former is “distantiated” from the latter to varying degrees.
The two concepts of contradictions and overdetermination can help to clear up a crucial point:
while the capitalist society forcibly presses the ISAs to interpellate individuals, their subjectivities are still overdetermined simply because their process of interpellation is invariably complicated by a variety of social contradictions. As a result, individuals may well assume “multiple, unstable, and decentered identities” (Wolff, 227), and they naturally may adopt numerous stances every now and
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then.
So far the parallelism between Macherey and Althusser has manifested itself: Althusser as well as his concept of the ISA figures explicitly in Balibar and Macherey’s “Literature as an Ideological Form,” where they conclude that “literature is historically constituted…in the dominant ideology,”
and that the unresolved social contradictions result in the internal division of the text. Here, not only do they concur with Althusser on the workings of the ISA but also they see eye to eye with him on how ideology ends up textually embedded. Balibar and Macherey consider social contradictions as the root cause of the narrative rupture, and they think the ideological reflection in the text is always incomplete. Althusser also acknowledges that social contradictions could be textually reflected, and he further traces the incompleteness of the ideological reflection in the text back to the fact that the text is certainly overdetermined. Furthermore, he links this reflection to the varying functionality of the ISA, claiming that various social contradictions may influence the workings of the ISA at varying levels, and that this is one of the reasons why the superstructure (, literature included, of course) is overdetermined.
Furthermore, the term of overdetermination is responsible for individuals’ shifting identities and stances, as I’ve previously mentioned. Here Althusser echoes Macherey once again: in A
Theory of Literary Production, Macherey speaks of a writer’s choice of positionality in relation to
ideology. He contends that such a writerly choice is absolutely necessary because “a writer never reflects mechanically or rigorously the ideology which he represents…[and] no ideology is sufficiently consistent to survive the test of figuration” (195, italics mine). From an Althusserian viewpoint, this writerly choice of positionality is a direct reflection of the “distantiation” or the“relative autonomy” of the superstructure, the writer’s complicated subjectivity, or the result of the writer’s overdetermination.
In terms of his said/unsaid model, Macherey explicates the relationship between the text, ideology, and history. As a matter of fact, this relationship can’t possibly be analyzed to a nicety without a discussion of Terry Eagleton. First, Eagleton has made an effort to divide ideology into
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several categories. In Criticism and Ideology, Eagleton has come up with these terms: General Ideology (GI), which denotes “that particular dominated ensemble of ideologies to be found in any social formation” (54); Authorial Ideology (AuI), which is “the effect of the author’s specific mode of biographical insertion into GI, a mode of insertion overdetermined by a series of distinct factors:
social class, sex, nationality, religion, geographical region and so on” (58); Aesthetic Ideology (AI),
“the specific region of GI, articulated with other such regions－the ethical, religious” (60), and above all, the literary.18F Then Eagleton elucidates the interconnections between GI, AI, and AuI:
Au I is not to be conflated with GI; nor is it to be identified with the ‘ideology of the text.’ The ideology of the text is not an ‘expression’ of authorial ideology: it is the product of an aesthetic working of ‘general’ ideology as that ideology is itself worked and ‘produced’ by an overdetermination of authorial-biographical factors.
AuI, then, is always GI as lived, worked and represented from a particular overdetermined standpoint within it. (59)
Of course, Eagleton’s use of the term “overdetermine(-ation)” manifestly indicates an
Althusserian influence. In the simplest sense, AuI is an overdetermined product of GI; on the other hand, GI, after aesthetically reworked and authorially overdetermined, can become the ideology of the text. Moreover, the AuI and GI equation may be utterly transformed as they are both likely to be involved with AI:
18 In Criticism and Ideology, the categorization of ideology is preceded by the two terms, General Mode of Production (GMP) and Literary Mode of Production (LMP). Of course, both of them can exert their influences on the production of ideology. For instance, in defining GI, Eagleton stresses the importance material production, “A dominant ideological formation is constituted by a relatively coherent set of ‘discourses’ of values, representations and beliefs which realized in certain material apparatuses and related to the structures of material production…”In addition, Eagleton argues,
“There is no necessary homology between GI and LMP…” And in the course of the buildup of his argument, Eagleton also deals with quite a bit historicity. That is, he doubtless adopts an approach of historical materialism. See Eagleton, 44-57.
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Moriarty concisely sums up the complex affinities of these terms, “The particular text, then, had to be understood as a specific articulation and processing of these factors [ie, AI, GI, and AuI]” (47,
italics mine). Indeed, GI, through the mediation of AI, may cancel, equal, or contradict with AuI,
and it may simply makes AuI a variable in this interrelationship.In Chapter Three of Criticism and Ideology, Eagleton invites us to see a larger picture: the relationship between the text, ideology, and history (, namely, an aspect Macherey has already
In Chapter Three of Criticism and Ideology, Eagleton invites us to see a larger picture: the relationship between the text, ideology, and history (, namely, an aspect Macherey has already