© Malcolm K. Read

1. The First Bourgeois Literatures
The 16th Century

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to go."
(Lewis Carroll)

Introduction

0.1. Literature has not always existed. The discourses to which today we apply the term "literary" constitute a historical reality that has been able to emerge only with the advent of a particular, unique set of conditions, namely those we associate with the ideological level characteristic of "modern" or "bourgeois" social formations, understood in the general sense. This is a considerable claim and will have to be justified one stage at a time.

0.2. What, in fact, do we call "literature" today? Simply this: a series of discourses that are above all the works of a single author, that is, are an object constructed by a single subject. Needless to say, the ideology dominant today, and by "today," I mean post-18th century, considers that all discourses -- not only literary discourses but also any other kind of discourse (the "theoretical" in general, the "scientific" in the strictest sense, the "political" broadly understood, along with "works of art," etc.) -- are objects constructed by one subject. What distinguishes literary texts from all these other, parallel discourses is simply the fact that in them is to be found the quintessential expression of real inner truth, the true intimacy of the "subject/author of a work." Consequently, the literary subject -- along with his/her text -- will appear not as a subject pure and simple, but as someone who, in the strictest sense, "speaks" or "expresses" him/herself always in the name of his/her own inner truth and, furthermore, in the name of the essential truth of all human subjects. (All of this, of course, independently of whether the author utilizes a "confessional" or "biographic" mode, or considers him/herself to be the transmitter of a social, popular or national truth, etc.).

0.2.1. The following categories have served to justify the existence of an "eternal" literature: 1) the supposedly permanent existence of the subject/author of "his/her" own work, expressing his/her own autonomous, interior truth through this work, and 2) inversely, the eternal existence of the kind of discourse that promotes itself as the pure expression of an author's interior voice and is collectively considered valid only to the extent that it exists as the expression of such a "voice."

Clearly, these approaches of an "eternalizing" kind betray a profoundly ahistorical bias. What we are proposing, by way of contrast, is a thesis that asserts the radical historicity of literature.

0.3. We take the term "history" very seriously, for which reason we are not interested in any patched-up job. It is not simply a question of adding that old stand-by the historical "context" or some other sociological context to the literary work in order to explain it from the "outside" (whilst others explain the strictly literary element of the work, what lies within, its "in itself").

For reasons that will emerge in due course, we intend to situate ourselves on the margins of all such dualistic approaches. (Basic to the latter is the belief that the work has an inside and an outside, an interior and an exterior, which in turn justifies the belief in a parallel duality of methods: the literary method proper -- the one which plumbs the "interior" -- and the external or contextual method.) To understand the literary work from the standpoint of its radical historicity means, on the contrary, we believe, that such historicity constitutes the actual basis of the productive logic of the text without which the text cannot exist (cannot function either "in itself" or "outside itself").

Returning at this point to our initial position: the possibility of literature -- we have in mind not only the appearance of the modern concept of literature, but at the same time, and this is much more important, the actual existence of the kind of discourse that we call literary -- can only arise with the logic of the "subject."

Strictly speaking, such a logic (in other words, the image of a "free," "autonomous" individual, an origin and an end in itself, possessing an "interior" -- a mind, reason, etc. -- a sole source of -- and solely responsible for -- all its ideas, its judgments, its sensations, its tastes, its knowledges and its discourses, etc.) derives directly -- and uniquely -- from the bourgeois ideological matrix. And does so for one very simple, albeit twin-faceted reason. In the first place, some kind of opposition needed to be mounted to the feudal ideology of the "serf" (or of service in the general sense) insofar as this ideology was blocking the establishment of "mercantile" or "capitalist" relations. If the serf remains bound substantially to the earth and to the lord, it is not possible to inscribe him within the limits of capitalism (even in its manufacturing stage). Bourgeois ideology, we are saying, needs to convert the serf into the proletarian, that is, into the free subject, in possession at least of his/her own inner truth (in this case, labor power), therefore, freely disposed to sell it in exchange for a wage.

But in the construction of the image of the subject, the battle against the feudal ideology of servitude represents only one factor: the other factor (the other face of the coin) is rooted in the actual construction of the bourgeois matrix, a matrix that requires that the articulation between different classes (dominant and dominated) always be conceived from the standpoint of the image of all men as free subjects, equal among themselves, in possession of their own inner truth. Without this basic image such a system cannot function. In other words, if the logic of the subject can only exist on the basis of certain objective conditions inscribed in a particular ideological matrix, if the "subject" is an invention of this "matrix," it will be pointless searching for such a logic within, for example, a "slavery" ideology or the feudal ideology of "service."

0.3.1. With one important proviso. The fact that not simply critics and readers but people in general should always presuppose, in the last instance, that literary discourse is nothing but this peculiar expression of the intimacy of a subject; that "authors" themselves should also believe this to be so (as the very basis of their existence, of their status as the "private owners" and "free creators" of "their" works -- hence the dogma of the freedom of the writer!); and even that discourses themselves are produced and reproduced from the standpoint of such a logic, etc. -- all of this gives rise to a situation that, for all its apparent obviousness, lends itself to every kind of error. It has to be treated with the utmost caution.

For if, in effect, we fail to take the full drift of this logic of the subject, if we understand it, for example, as an independent literary reality, we will be driven to conclude, paradoxically, that, after having covered so much ground, all we have done is to replace the "in itself" of the work with the "in itself" of the subject. As a result of which we would again fall back into our earlier "a-historicity," only now in a much more subtle form.

Let us accept this logic of the subject as a reality, for hypothetical purposes, to see exactly where it leads. Let us accept that the discourses we today call literary can only exist if a "subject" exists; that the figures of the "author," of the "critic" (who judges in the first instance) and of the reader (who judges in the last) can only be constituted insofar as they are in turn configured as free and autonomous subjects; that discourse itself can only be constructed as the expression of a subjectivity .... Let us accept all of this. What does it mean? All it can mean, according to the logic of the subject, is that when a new age begins, a "new spirit" begins with it (that would give a new content or new style to discourses) as "phenomenologists" would say, or rather (as empiricists would prefer) that a moment has been reached when men have finally recognized the free and autonomous nature of their own "self," of their own "mind," and have proceeded, on this basis, to generate new discourses of their own.

Such claims could well be made, and indeed in all likelihood will be. However, the situation is one we should try and avoid at all cost and in the only way possible, by strictly delimiting the relevant fields.

What are we saying? Something very obvious, but which lends itself to being misunderstood: we are saying not simply that literature emerges when the logic of the subject emerges, but, more importantly, that this logic is nothing more than a derivation -- an "invention" of a particular ideological matrix.

In this way, we believe, we will avoid falling into the trap of that subtle "ahistoricity" to which we referred earlier, which presents itself under the guise of a historicism, otherwise a more or less discontinuous "evolutionism." Such historicism accommodates changes of "epoch," of "style," changes of "form" and of "contents," and admits that "modern literature" is peculiar to the "modern age," and "feudal literature" to the "feudal age," but always on the basis of certain conditions:

(a) Both the "feudal" and "modern" are essentially -- in the last instance -- the same thing, in that both are "literature," possess the same underlying productive structure, and presuppose the same basic "subject"/"work" relation, in which the work expresses the intimate truth of its author. The only difference is that the feudal author and work are more conditioned by a series of exterior bonds, social conventions and obligations, false beliefs and irrationalisms (all imposed within the framework of courts or monasteries, rules of chivalry and scholastic theorizations), and that, in contrast, the "modern" author and work of art correspond to another "spirit of the age." The latter is understood in the sense of another "style," in which "man" (and with him his diverse expressions: literature, philosophy, politics) has been able to rediscover himself, to free himself to a great extent from conventions and prejudices, and finally to discover his own interior being (free, pure, autonomous: cf. the current initiated above all by Kant and the Enlightenment); or rather another "context," in which "man" has attained a degree of maturity and solidity sufficient to be able to judge, to perform and to express himself solely from the standpoint of his own personal, independent experience (cf. the diverse "empiricist" tendencies). In a word: greater dependence upon the outside world in "feudal literature", greater dependence upon the inside world in "modern literature"; but in both, the key relation, between "subject" and "work," perdures, along with a common productive structure.

(b) In a parallel kind of way, it is recognized, with respect to both "feudal" and "modern" literature, that the characteristics discussed above -- in one case "exteriority" and the social conditioning of the subject; in the other, free, autonomous, self-expressive individuality -- constitute respectively the truth of those "feudal" and "modern" texts in which they present themselves to us.

0.3.2. The consequences are as follows:

-- In the first approach, what is seemingly denied is that literature has undergone any changes, has evolved, etc.; but only in order to affirm that literature is an autonomous and homogeneous field, which possesses an essential unity from its immemorial origins until today, and that what may appear to be changes or evolutions are only accidental variations contained within the interior of that "eternal" field which is literature.

-- In the second approach, the subtlety is even greater. When evolutionist positivism argues that "a regulated medieval subjectivity is the truth of feudal literature," or that "a replete modern individuality is the truth of current individualist literature," we ought not to treat its images lightly. These are not simple examples of a typically scholastic mode of argumentation, to the effect, for example, that if opium induces sleep, it is because it possesses sleep-inducing virtues. Rather more is involved than that. What we must really ask ourselves -- as always -- is: what lies hidden beneath such images? what logic sustains them?

0.3.3. We thus get to the nub of all the issues that need to be debated. For as can easily be shown, what is really conceived of as "ahistorical" (in this whole series of propositions) is the very notion of the "subject" (the same subject, for example, in the "medieval" and in the "modern" world) or of "man" or whatever he might be called. (I have no intention at this point of replaying the notorious polemic over "humanism," which a few years ago surrounded the work of Althusser -- a polemic that was boring for being so confused -- for the simple reason that -- among other things -- we are here trying precisely to separate out elements that were fused together in that polemic, sustaining it and blinding its participants at the same time. Trying, in other words, to delimit on the one hand, the -- let us say -- physical reality of individual human beings and, on the other, the notion of "man" as precisely that, a "notion." And it is only in this last sense, as should be obvious, that we are here using the terms "man" and "subject".) The notion of the subject (and the whole problematic within which it is inscribed) is radically historical because, as explained above, it derives directly (and exclusively) from the very matrix of the bourgeois ideological unconscious: the "serf" can never be a "subject," etc. But for that very reason also the theoretical perspectives originating in the same bourgeois ideology will never be able to accept that their own unconscious is at root an ideological (that is to say, historical) issue, but will always believe that the elements and logic peculiar to such an "unconscious" constitute the truth about the human condition, in all its clarity. From which it follows, for example, that the idea of "Reason" (and its logic; or its converse: "the irrational") will never be understood as an ideological construct emanating directly from the classic bourgeoisies, but only as a "natural" element embedded (cf. Diderot, Valery, Lukács ...) in humanity's very core. The same could be said regarding the empiricist variant of this idea of Reason (the notion of "mind" and of "internal psychology" etc.) and, for that matter, any other thematics that might be on offer, especially the notion of the "subject," which legitimates and sustains all the others in this perspective (and, consequently, whose "historicity" will need to be denied most vehemently).

The methods used to achieve such a negation are the same ones that we previously detected, in their general outline, as regards literature. They can all be summed up as follows: the notion of man/subject is an eternal reality that may have gradually evolved and grown denser, that can vary in its "content" or in its "ideas," but that will always possess -- either latently or explicitly -- its own internal logic, a common structure essentially unchanging over the centuries. In the second part of this book, when we come to analyze the series of polemics still surrounding the "Renaissance," we try to delimit in detail the most typical characterizations bequeathed by traditional "evolutionism" regarding the whole series of historiographic problems that we are posing here; and we try to do the same when we come to discuss the "radical historicity" of 16th-century animist poetics or the interpretation of animist poetic texts from the standpoint of an "eternalizing evolutionism." The reader will find substantiated there what is being articulated here only in its general outlines.

0.3.4. Our basic argument can be broken down into its diverse components thus:

(a) Even if from our own standpoint the nodal image of the subject is not "for all seasons" but radically historical, insofar as it can only function and exist within a particular matrix, it does not follow that such an image constitutes an effective, self-sufficient reality in itself. The "serf/subject" opposition, we emphasized, does not suppose the transition from man-in-chains to man-in-himself, unencumbered and undetermined. On the contrary, such an opposition can only signify the transition from one set of social relations to another (serf is only a term that indicates the special -- and necessary -- inscription of individuals in class relations characteristic of feudalism; subject is only a term that indicates the special -- and similarly necessary -- inscription of individuals in class relations characteristic of capitalism, both in its early phase and in its later phases).

In a word, such notions are not effective realities in themselves: they only constitute privileged categories in which are expressed and objectified the basic mechanisms of the feudal or bourgeois ideological matrix, categories in which ideologies are vividly condensed and realized. (In this regard, let us recall comparable claims by Ian Watt or Lukács to the effect that the appearance in the 18th century of the modern "realist novel" corresponds with that of an effective "realist spirit": man converted finally into a free and pragmatic subject and the novel "reflecting" such a reality.) And it would be quite wrong, an irredeemable error, in fact, from the standpoint of our own analysis, simply to identify the internal processes of an ideology with the most salient notions in which such an ideology is exhibited or becomes visible. When we say that the "serf" or the "subject" never actually exist, we do not mean "only" at the economic level or at the political level, as the case may be. (Both of these are levels that a certain mechanistic tradition within Marxism considers to be the "only real" and, by simply inverting the Hegelian dialectic, has commonly identified with the very essence of reality. As we know today, ideology constitutes an objective level of a particular social formation, is a reality as full as any other social level, and the fact that the economic instance is ultimately determinant does not mean that the other levels are not just as "real.") Rather we mean that the serf and subject do not actually exist as full values in themselves even within their respective ideological instances.

(b) For, in effect, the configuration of the ideological level in any social formation is always dual: on the one hand, we have what it says it is; on the other, we have what it really is. In other words, on the one hand, we have its visible notions, and on the other, how it actually functions. Let us take these in turn:

0.3.5. Key Notions

What an ideological level "says it is" it says through recourse to a series of privileged, basic, sacrosanct "notions" or "key ideas" (so defined because they usually pose as the truth about "human nature") such as those mentioned above. According to feudal ideology, man is essentially a "serf"/ "servant" of a "Lord" (whether the latter is written with a capital letter or not), a key notion whose presence, latent but incontrovertible, always makes itself felt at the heart of medieval ideological production. Likewise, what the bourgeois ideological matrix "says" is that "man" is essentially a "free subject" (likewise, a concept that will always underwrite "modern" ideological production of whatever kind). But neither perspective stops there:� when they define, for example, what "man" is, they are likewise defining what they themselves "are": they are saying that if the subject and the serf are basic realities, they themselves (who have secreted such notions) are for that very reason also basic realities, and automatically so. �In other words, each ideological matrix announces itself via certain key notions, to which it grants the status of essential and unalterable elements of reality. But it does so only to immediately camouflage its own status qua "ideology" by sheltering and hiding behind the notions that it has already been able to establish as the truth about life. Hence the fact that individuals inscribed within feudal relations -- both those belonging to the dominated classes and those belonging to the dominating, that is, both the real serfs and the mere "servants of God" -- conceive such relations, live them, as effectively "servile," conceive of themselves (and cannot avoid doing so) as literally "serfs." And the same could be said with respect to the image of the "subject" within bourgeois social relations of production: all the individuals inscribed in such relations (both the dominating and the dominated) believe themselves truly to be "subjects," conceive of themselves as such (just as they conceive of the world) solely and exclusively from this perspective, cannot pass beyond it, cannot surpass its limits.

0.3.6. The Processes

Now then, what exactly do such concepts mean, how are they constituted, whence are they derived?

The answer is easy to come by, since we already know it: such notions are nothing more than the result, the appearance on the outside in the form of a visible "sign," of a number of internal requirements that belong properly and exclusively to one specific ideological matrix, and to no other. Thus, for example, feudal social relations -- en bloc -- require "their" ideological level to "convert" all individuals into serfs, just as bourgeois social relations -- en bloc -- require "their" ideological level to "convert" all individuals into free subjects, etc. In sum: (a) the real internal functioning, the root logic of a particular ideological level, always depends -- and exclusively so -- on the elements that enter into play in its "matrix," and (b) an (ideological) matrix is nothing other than the reproduction, at the level of ideology, of the basic class contradiction that constitutes each kind of social relations: the "contradiction" between "serfs/lords" within feudalism, the contradiction between "bourgeoisie"/proletariat" within capitalism, etc. �For serf is only the ideological concept through which is expressed, legitimated and lived the specific articulation of classes in feudalism; subject is only the ideological concept through which is expressed, legitimated and lived the specific articulation of classes in capitalist societies, etc.

Concepts: that is, mere secretions of the root ideological infrastructure. Thus, the English realist novel of the 18th century did not appear, pace Watt or Lukács, because the "realist spirit" had already appeared, in the form of "free, pragmatic subjects," walking the streets of London and inscribed in the juridical language of the age. Likewise, the literature of the "Renaissance" did not appear because previously the "consciousness of individuality" and the freedom of men had appeared. The "full subject" of 18th-century England or the "free individuality" of 16th-century Italy are nothing more than images or notions through which surfaces the bourgeois ideology corresponding to each of these phases. �Accordingly, the realist subject or full individuality are not realities in themselves, either political or economic, nor even "eidetic" or "spiritual" realities, as some would argue. Such notions only exist as symptoms of a more underlying logic, that of the bourgeois ideological matrix that sustains them and that manifests itself in them. And consequently it will be this ideological matrix -- including its demands and internal processes -- that will actually cause the appearance of both types of discourse (always allowing for the obvious historical differences that exist between the 16th and 18th centuries). Emphatically, "free individuality" or the "pragmatist subject" are not to be considered "spiritual" and "eidetic" realities in themselves.

In short: the subject is an invention of the bourgeois ideological matrix, but the latter (a) translates it to all epochs and (b) tries to pass it off as a reality both at the political or economic level, not to mention the "eidetic" or "spiritual" level, terms actually used by the ideology in question with reference, for example, to the juridical subject or the literary subject. Of course, this does not stop legal or literary discourses from being structured, within the bourgeois domain, from the standpoint of the thematics of the "subject." Our object, in this respect, is simply to show that such a thematic is historical through and through, insofar as it is a faithful transcription of basic bourgeois ideology.

0.3.7. The consequences are as follows:

(a) If the internal logic of a particular matrix is the one true determination of all types of discourses that the matrix secretes, including literary discourses, it must be the same "historical logic" that, in the last instance, we need to bear very much in mind when we approach any of "its" productions. Equally, we need to consider that the difference between literary discourses and other parallel discourses (such as those which -- still today -- we call "theoretical," etc.) can only be specified on the basis of the internal functioning of each historical matrix.

(b) Likewise, our basic proposition about the radical historicity of literature cannot apply simply to the "origins" or the date of birth of this literature, but must apply above all, as we are now in a better position to appreciate, to the fact that these particular literary discourses (or comparable ones from any other previous or subsequent social formation) are always -- and exclusively -- secreted from (and determined by) the specific requirements of any historically given ideological matrix. As a result of which we need to pose again the problem adumbrated earlier as to why, within the confines of a single matrix, certain kinds of discourse should be more visible than others, and why they should be "conceived" and "legitimated" in the way they are; why, also, these same discourses are elaborated from a particular perspective, to achieve a particular kind of self-referentiality; and why, finally, all this occurs at a particular historical juncture, and not at any other. �

The reader will meet this kind of question again and again during the course of this book. For example, how do we explain the appearance of the sonnet or of the dialogue as the discursive forms par excellence of bourgeois animism, or of the dialectic of "light" and "fire" in Saint John of the Cross, in Fernando de Herrera or in John Donne; likewise, the appearance of the dialectic of "water" and "movement" in Garcilaso, or of the notion of the "beautiful soul" within the framework of this same poetics and in opposition to the feudal notion of "blood," etc.

0.4. When the theoretical problematic changes, so too does the "object" that this problematic analyzes. Neither the productive processes of the text nor their global meaning, nor their historical situation can ever be the same when focused from the standpoint of an "eternalizing evolutionism" as when they are viewed from the standpoint of their "radical historical objectivity." This can be confirmed easily enough: if, for the latter problematic, the text is never a direct secretion from a subject, if it is never a unitary object expressing the supposed intimacy of "its" author, etc., obviously the whole textual enunciation en bloc -- the literary discourse in itself, in other words -- will offer us a meaning and a configuration that are quite different from those originating in an "evolutionist" perspective.

It is the aim of this book to specify, with the greatest possible rigor, this change in the total meaning of literature as an object, by focusing it from the standpoint of another theoretical problematic. To specify it, moreover, at all levels, with respect to (a) the most "abstract" -- sic -- literary theory, (b) the strict development of a concrete literary tendency (in this case the one we have called "bourgeois animism" ) and (c) the precise, literal reading of this tendency's most characteristic texts of the period. For this reason we have entitled a very specific section of this book "Principles of Reading" with regard to animist poetics. Although such principles have been formulated strictly in the light of the poems of Garcilaso, there can be no doubting that they are applicable to the whole of this poetics in general, since, by establishing them, we have only tried to show how a key series of traditional prejudices -- for example, the idea of the "transparency of the text" or that of the "direct" or "innocent reading" -- are nothing more than literal derivations of the critical perspective we have referred to as "eternalizing evolutionism."

Having sketched out our plan of attack, we have only to delimit a final series of questions -- final, but no less important for being that. They are more or less as follows:

1. In what other ways are literary discourses specifically characterized within the present theoretical horizon?

2. What real function do literary discourses fulfill from their place within the "modern" or "bourgeois" ideological instance?

3. What is the real meaning of the whole broad gamut of discourses -- usually labeled as "literary" -- which belong to non-capitalist modes of production? Particularly those which belong to Greek slavery or to the feudal matrix, since we will be using them continually in order to counterpoise them to the discourses that existed in post-18th century societies. �

Obviously, it would be absolutely imperative to be able to offer a completely adequate reply to each one of these questions, by way of clarifying the possible ambiguities still latent in our formulations. But a full explanation of this kind is impossible here. A few comments will have to suffice.

0.4.1. The First Question

Within the present theoretical horizon, it is normal practice to characterize so-called literary discourses, in addition to conceiving them as the pure expression of the intimacy of the subject, as specifically linguistic and emotive.

(a) Linguistic. This may be hard to believe, but it is so. While any kind of discourse, from the mathematical to the juridical, is characterized as basically linguistic, it is usual only for the "literary" kind to be distinguished as linguistic par excellence. As if it were all simple and straight forward. Why? One possibility suggests itself. Could it be that the basic equation between the literary and the pure intimacy of the subject is the result of a specifically linguistic focus, whereby the image of the literary is identified with the pure intimacy of language, that is to say, with language when it is used in and for itself, without any other "exterior" goals? Consider in this respect all the theoretical disquisitions about "art for art's sake," those of Russian Formalism and Stylistics, and in general those of the majority of "linguistic" critics beginning with Jakobson. �True, the empiricist currents (neopositivist, analytic, etc.) introduce a variation of the theme: in them the almost exclusive linguisticism of literature is placed, for the time being, in limbo, but only insofar as such currents move within a total "panlinguisticism": for them, "everything" is language. As an obvious result of which, although via different routes, literature will come to be marked, exclusively, with a specific linguistic sign: �"literature" is in general all language that is not verifiable, that is freely imaginative and emotive, etc., that is to say, the most personal, subjective language, the least preoccupied with objectivity and communication, in a word the most "intimate."

(b) Emotive. Again, what we are dealing with here is the unfolding of a central idea regarding the identity between literature and the intimacy of the subject. The most intimate part of the latter will be rooted (from the standpoint of the bourgeois ideological horizon in question) precisely in the darkest, deepest, most spontaneous regions of the human psyche, otherwise those most removed from the outside and from the control of "reason." Among these are to be found, according to classic bourgeois ideology, the emotive centers of the subject, which include the source of its sensibility, whether the latter simply overflows, expressively speaking -- as the Romantics preferred -- or whether it is couched within similarly emotive forms -- as phenomenologists have all proposed from the beginning of the century.

In the empiricist critical currents, it has been possible to lay claim to a literature in which the writer's thought might also seem poetically valid (cf. all Eliot's criticism). (These currents, it will be recalled, never need to differentiate clearly between "ideas" and "sensations," insofar as the latter are not something really distinct from the former, but only their primary source.) �Even here, however, it is important to bear in mind that the final determination of poetic language is ceded directly to the levels of "sensation" -- sic -- rather than being envisaged as a direct influx of "rationality."

In sum, the ways in which the dominant theoretical ideology characterizes literary discourse, including criticism's obsession with finding the interior or intimacy of the text, amount to nothing more than the unfolding of the primary "subject"/ "intimacy" relation, a relation already established by Kant as what is specific and unique to literature, indeed to the "aesthetic" in general. (In general terms, the basis for this differentiation of aesthetic discourse from other discourses is effectively in place from the moment at which three "mental" processes or separate "languages" are established in the subject proper, each one with its specific, autonomous mechanisms, a specification that is realized precisely throughout the three Kantian critiques. After which the line of development is uninterrupted, from Schiller to Croce. Much the same could be said of empiricism, from Hume to Richards, Eliot or the New Criticism.)

0.4.2. The Second Question

Here things are not quite so straightforward. What is the real function of literary discourses within the "modern" ideological instance? In the first place one would need to analyze the triple development of the historical phases of classic bourgeois ideology (the manufacturing or mercantilist phase, the "classic" phase and the current, final phase), since in each one of them the function of literary discourse and of the writer, understood in their social dimension, will have different ramifications. As a case in point, take the (capitalist) socialization or collectivization of the forces of production -- a particularly well-known and symptomatic phenomenon -- imposed on a massive scale during the most recent phase. (The aspects of the process we have in mind include the need for a "production line," the increasing separation between the worker and the object produced, the consequent economistic ideology, also pervasive, of "useful" work, understood as work inscribed directly in the relations of production, both in the productive sphere itself and in the sphere of "circulation" -- etc.) The whole of this unitary structure necessarily brings in tow the image of the "social marginalization" of the artist or the writer (literature or art considered as "useless" activities and, therefore, only appropriate for the reduced space of "idleness," or of "intellectual or material luxury" [sic] --, "hobbies," week-end activities of a minority kind, distanced from "common sensibility," etc.). It is something that writers themselves assume after their own fashion, from the Romantic period onwards, leading them to cultivate marginalization precisely as a good, as a special destiny, a sign of their superiority over the social domain. Hence the element of self-consciousness, symptomatic of which is the contrived isolationism, the bohemianism, the cult of evil, the accentuation of the hermetic character of literary language proper. But it is real marginalization, for all that, to the extent that the labor of the writer -- consisting of a direct "subject"/ "object" relation, which the writer actively assumes, and a product valued precisely for being "personal and unique" -- refers directly to the "artesanal," "pre-industrial" status of work. As a labor process, it was bound to clash directly with the newly established economistic norms. �

Even so, things are more complex than such a situation would seem to indicate, and it is the goal of works by R. and E. Balibar, P. Macherey, F. Vernier, et al. to underline this complexity as it relates to the function of the literary event in modern societies. �For it could, in fact, be argued that the marginalization in question operates above all and exclusively within the economist ideological horizon proper. (By this we mean that it is something that follows directly from the contrast between the image of "collective industrial labor" and that of "personal artesanal labor," something, in short, that resembles the habitual Romantic opposition between the "hand" and the "machine.") But the literary work does not function solely at the level of economic ideology, or rather, when it does function there, its key terms of reference are strictly and exclusively ideological, and it is this ideological standpoint, literally understood, which we ought to consider in the first instance. In effect, the above works by E. and R. Balibar, Macherey, Vernier, et al. lay special emphasis upon the intimate relation that exists between the educational apparatus and the literary event, between the teaching of the common language (or rather, the language of the state) and the establishment of the "common" or state primary school in the bourgeois states after the French Revolution.

Naturally, global scholarization occurs much earlier and is more effective in France than in the other European countries, and special studies would be required of each "national" case, after the manner, for example, of those begun by Gramsci, with respect to the originally unsuccessful linguistic unification of Italy and its precarious educational apparatus. Such studies would focus on the frustrating "regional" inequalities, the open wound �that are the popular layers, whose only language -- a spoken language -- is distinct from that of the state, or, which amounts to the same thing, in terms of degree of inferiority, who only "speak" the national language in a dialectal or "vulgar" manner. Other studies would explore the different ways in which all these secondary contradictions have been formulated, generally by idealizing, petty-bourgeois ideologues, (and that are "always" reflections of the principal class divisions, or that are inherent in the "pacts" between the state or local "national bourgeoisies," dating from earlier situations within the Ancient Regime: the feudal geographical and political fragmentation, the division between the diverse seigneurial and ecclesiastical powers that now try to join forces under the bourgeois state, or the guild and artesanal residues, likewise flourishing under the Old Regime, and now displaced and sensing their demise, a death sentence, both linguistic and economic.) In short, studies of the real levels of exploitation inscribed in that unitary mechanism which is the "centralized bourgeois State/official, common language/primary and equally common school."

For the investigators referred to above — we are possibly interpreting their presuppositions rather freely, from our own particular standpoint -- the relation between Literature and the School would be specified in the following terms: the literary language, taught only in the high school and the university, would be opposed to the common language, taught in the state school. The latter's descriptive and narrative modules would, in this way, be directed towards serving strictly practical and utilitarian purposes. (Hence all the rhetoric of a conformist kind regarding "writing" at the primary-school level.) The basic assumption is that, in order to develop later, those attending primary school (and who are not going to progress beyond it, in other words, basically workers and peasants) need their own special kind of activities. These will be of a specifically practical, hence "manual," nature. In secondary education, by way of contrast, a language would be taught that is capable of admitting "fantasy" and "free subjective interpretation." This second stage of education presupposes writing modules that teach something more than mere "description" (or "narration"), of a practical and literally object-oriented kind. In other words, modules that would transport us directly to the aforementioned "superior" realms of sensibility and intellectual reflection -- sic -- that are more arbitrary and subjective and freely interpretive of the world of men and of external reality. Enter at this moment the teaching of poetry, a supremely "free" and "imaginative" means of expression, or, to the same end, "fictional" narration.

The key to the whole question, it would seem, lies here. Whilst in accordance with the dominant economicistic norm, everything not directly useful, practical or profitable is immediately considered inferior or at least marginal and expendable, the dominant ideology itself requires nevertheless that those belonging to the upper layers -- supposedly the most educated, the most "intelligent" -- possess a freely interpreting intimacy (that is not directly useful or pragmatic in a worldly sense). For this to be possible, these highly educated and intelligent individuals need to receive an education of an appropriate kind, as a result of which they will automatically be considered true "subjects," in every sense of the word, and therefore the only ones truly fitted to "have opinions," to "give orders," and in short to "elect/receive," after their free and subjective education, a directly useful and pragmatic profession. Hence, for example, the correlation, so visible in the United States and England, between the merely "culturalist" and "literary" -- in other words, "useless" - education of the elites and the directly entrepreneurial and political destiny of such elites once "qualified."

At this point, then, a distinction has been successfully established by Balibar and Macherey between a common and a literary language (or rather, between a scholastic subjectivity that is merely utilitarian and one that is full and free). They have further demonstrated the legitimizing basis of the differentiation between "manual work" on the one hand and "intellectual work" on the other, and, following on from this, the solidification of class differences via the same "linguistic-scholastic" distinctions. Finally, however, the question remains: what basic function do strictly literary discourses fulfill within the present ideological horizon? According to Balibar and Macherey, simply this: to produce new discourses, literary or otherwise, their modules serving as operators and stimulants of new "writings" or social "languages" that in turn will reproduce all the specific conditions of domination inscribed in the original discourses and in their linguistic class position.

It goes without saying, of course, that all these propositions are suggestive enough, and seem largely to correspond to the reality of literature,� particularly as far as material bases are concerned. We have in mind the Educational Apparatus, through which literary ideology is concretized and propagated in the first instance, to which could be added the whole problematic inscribed within the publishing business. (The latter to be understood in the broadest sense, from the literal demands of the market to the more subtle operation of special, broadly based "reading regimes," such as those modeled on the "best-seller" or the literary prizes.) �

But there is a basic objection to be made to the fixation on the School that these authors display. Nobody doubts the discriminatory importance of the process of scholarization as it relates to the upper levels, otherwise, in the last instance, to the university. (We would draw attention, above all, to something barely apparent in the texts of R. Balibar or V. Vernier, namely the function of this process as the one valid conveyor belt operating between classes. It is, after all, only the university graduate who, however humble in origins, is admitted as a member of the upper layers.) Moreover, we even have no problem in conceding to these same authors that literature, understood as the capacity to "write" and to "consume" a sophisticated language, is an almost perfect symbol of such a discriminatory situation. But the appreciation of literature's "symbolic/discriminatory" function is one thing: it is another to calmly proceed, on this basis, to a radical and all-encompassing explanation of the whole literary domain. Consider, for example, R. Balibar’s reading of Camus' The Stranger, and the importance that it attaches to Marsault’s status as a university student manqué, who finds all the possible opportunities for ascent to the petty bourgeoisie closed off. (The supposition is that, finally, Camus also found his own "social exits" closed off, after typhus robbed him unexpectedly of a career as professor of philosophy.) �Such an analysis is notable for its "vital experientialism," of a fairly ingenuous kind. The key to Camus' text, we suggest, does not lie here but rather in the following question: from the standpoint of which ideological unconscious is the experience of frustration assumed, lived and later "expressed" in a novel? Why, to put the same question in another way, did The Stranger take the form it did? What was it about the climate of post-war France that favored this form of the novel, and not that of a directly "experiential" kind, such as we find in America, from Salinger to Updike, from Mailer to Kerouac?

The basic objection to such approaches as Balibar's can be simply put: who educates the educators? Stated rather more forcefully: it is not the school that creates "creates" ideology, notwithstanding its function as a State Apparatus; the school only materializes and reproduces this ideology, in the peculiar form we have outlined. From this, other things follow: for example, it is not only the need for a common language that is "prior" to the school, so too is the distinction between "manual" and "intellectual" labor, in other words, the social division of labor. And so too is the literary reflection of such a social division, that is, the possibility of thinking that there is someone capable of utilizing -- and of consuming -- a "superior" and "freely subjective" language. In the same way, the dialectic inscribed in the literary texts (that which produces them as such, their internal logic) is what shapes an ideological unconscious. The latter is "born" not in the School, but in the interior of the social relations themselves, and derives directly from these relations. Perhaps the basic problem with the theses of Macherey, Balibar, et al. is that they retain the foul, unmistakable odor of "institutionalist sociologism," reminiscent of Max Weber at his most typical. Weber, it will be recalled, argues that it is the material institution that creates ideology, that, for example, it is the Protestant Church that creates the Protestant religion. We will be arguing the reverse during the course of this book.

This "institutionalist sociologism" naturally brings in its train a parallel view of ideology -- half mechanistic, half naive -- as a simple excrescence of material fact (of, for example, the writing programs in the School), a conception that radically detracts from the ambitious projects of the aforementioned authors. Much the same could be said of the total identification established by these authors between the linguistic and the literary process. As we indicated earlier, it constitutes a stumbling block that, to begin with, would prevent the appreciation of real differences between the literary process and other linguistic processes, from philosophical to mathematical discourses. The latter are every bit as "superior" and "sophisticated" as the former. Of course, this does not mean that it is sufficient, by way of capturing the specificity of literary discourse, to indicate the existing difference between the "common linguistic norm" and the écart (otherwise, the "creative" and "personal" exception or deviation from the norm, its "superior" usage), since, I repeat, all the other "superior" types of discourses would be in the same position. It should be remembered, finally, that the alleged relation between the Norm and the Ecart was already well established from Spitzer and the other theoreticians of Phenomenological Stylistics onwards. (Curiously enough, this current is still very much alive in France where, in the form of a "scholastic, academic" tradition, it poses as the very embodiment of truth. Indeed, it is within this "stylistic" domain that the full identification between language and literature reaches paroxysmal proportions. As a "stylistic" tendency, it seems to be accepted happily enough by the above-mentioned investigators — their only stipulation is that a "material" or "sociological" base, such as the school, writing programs, etc., be subsequently added. This explains why Macherey and Balibar should proudly claim to have revealed the original secret, the material as opposed to vaguely "spiritualist" source of literature.) �

Over and above such sociologistic presuppositions, it seems clear that the functionality of literary discourse and its real meaning for our societies are issues that need to be sought more in the interior of the ideological level proper than in the apparatuses that materialize and reproduce them. They need to be sought, for example, in the vicinity of that crucial differentiation between process and concepts within a specific ideological matrix, since everything seems to indicate that if literary discourses, in an elaborated form, are strictly a development of the first of these (the logic of the matrix in process), "theoretical" discourses are a development of the second aspect (the "concepts," etc.). But we are not going to insist now upon something that surpasses by far the limits of an "introduction." Let it suffice to detail what has already been indicated: literature is not "created" in the School, but is a special product of an ideological unconscious secreted from an historical matrix and peculiar to specific social relations. And the fact that in post-18th century societies such social relations depend so directly -- at the ideological level -- upon the actual deployment of the subject form would explain, uniquely, the historical situation we have been describing all along, and the peculiar significance of so-called literary discourses (conceived and practiced precisely as the expression of the purest "subjectivity") within the matrix in question.

0.4.3. The Third Question

What happens in the other modes of production where the logic of the subject does not exist? What real function or sense do discourses have that originate in the actual internal processes of the ideological matrix? It would rather seem that in such historical formations the rigid division between literary and theoretical discourses, as practiced in capitalist social formations, does not exist, or at least that such a division is mitigated or much more focused in another sense. For example, how do we differentiate such levels in the Bible, in medieval liturgical practices, in courtly or chivalrous codes, in the Koran, even or in the Vedic texts, in Pythagorean tales or in the so-called "tragic" (that is, liturgical) dramatizations of the Eumenides or of the myths supportive of the polis in general in slave-owning Greece?

0.5. Let us finish here. There are too many questions and too many problems mounting up around these three nodal questions. In order to respond to them adequately we have conceived this book: Theory and History of Ideological Production. A slippery title perhaps, for being over-ambitious, but one which in no way pretends to encompass all the relevant problems. It has been selected simply as an index of the concrete sense to which our project lays claim: there is no "history" without "theory" and no "theory" without "history," although we need not pause at this point to clarify such an affirmation. Let the following suffice: if literature has not always existed, its historical analysis is indispensable. But in order to take on board this "non-eternal existence," it is important to set off from an adequate theoretical conception both of what the literary or ideological processes and their mechanisms might be and of the historical process in general. What I am saying is that I do not believe it is possible to delimit those two moments (theory or history), but that it is always important to set off from their effective fusion in order to arrive at a concrete analysis of each situation. To speak, finally, of ideological production, and not exclusively of literary production, supposes not only that we take the latter as an illustration of the global ideological process, but that at the same time we refer continually to the other parallel discourses secreted at the same ideological level. Our approach will also determine the argumentative strategies deployed, through which to justify equating the "first bourgeois literatures" with the series of discourses emanating from the animist and rationalist thematics of the 16th century. The same strategies will similarly justify our attempt at clarification, still provisional, as to how literary processes seem to function during the confused and contradictory moments of a transition, such as that between Feudalism and Capitalism. Finally we have offered, to support such analyses, a close reading of the most significant animist texts from Garcilaso to Donne. We hope that its results will be received positively.

This is not a "method," but merely a theoretical path. Of course, the literary event can be approached in many different ways, and each of us can select the one that seems most valid. It will all depend, as Carroll says, where we want to go.

Granada-Madrid October 1974