Introduction to Marxist Literary Theory - YouTube

In this video I'd like to introduce you to just a few basic concepts from the

world of Marxist literary theory, and then in a separate video we'll see if we

can apply some of these ideas to William Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a

Cloud." The basic idea with Marxist literary theory is that we see the text

as somehow in relation to the economic conditions of the time, and Karl Marx in

the 19th century famously distinguished between these two

levels of culture and society and life basically. The one he called the

base or the infrastructure ... and this is the economic

aspect of life. This indicates the tools that we use, the way we organize

ourselves in terms of having a boss and a worker let's say. It includes

technological change and innovation, how you work, how work is organized, all of

these aspects are part of the base and Marx has very specific terms for these

things. He talks about means of production, forces of production,

relations of production, and so on. But we just want the basic idea here, that we

have this kind of economic reality that tells us how we work. And then above that

is the superstructure. So the superstructure is somehow affected by

this and "super" means above, or on top. So Marx's basic point is that somehow

historically economics influences everything else in life. And the

direction of this then is always upward. The influence is from economics to

the superstructure. So if we were to say what's in the superstructure we would

say well it's it's everything including politics, law, theology,

literature, entertainment -- basically anything that involves what Marx would

say is consciousness. This is the phrase or the word that

he uses: consciousness. And there's a very famous quotation which I'll read to you.

He wrote, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on

the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness." And by

social being Marx really was referring to this this kind of base or

infrastructure -- their social or we might say their economic being ... their

social being. And that influences consciousness. Sometimes it's easier

just to give an example of this, and let's say that you're living in some

kind of agricultural society in the past, and you have a lot of sheep.

You have flocks and you shear them and this is part of

your livelihood. So let's say that you have sheep and this is part of the base --

this kind of agricultural society. Well, what kind of effect is this going

to have on the superstructure? Marx would point out that if let's say you're

living in ancient Israel, and you're part of a Jewish society you might have a

particular conception of God. You might compare Him let's say to a

shepherd. If you think of Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want"),

Marx would say it's a direct result of having this kind of society. And if

you change the society a little bit then the parameters change as well. So I

think if we if we kind of sketch this out a little bit differently, we start to

see that each society has its own parameters. Here we have

different societies. If we have an agricultural society over here, and we

have a nomadic society over here, and we can compare them, then we can see that there

are these kind of blinders, these kind of limitations on consciousness, on what is

possible in terms of thought. An agricultural society might have a very

different sense of divinity or the divine than a nomadic society. An

agricultural society might have gods that are fertility gods, let's say.

So we're going to get some fertility gods over here. But a nomadic

society might instead have a god that's involved with trade, let's say,

or a God that's involved with marriage. Because to a nomadic

society, making marriages with different cultural groups and fostering those

relationships might be really important. The point then is that our

consciousness, if we think of this as like the thoughts that we have, and these

kind of come bubbling up from the bottom, then you can see that there are these

limitations. An agricultural society is not necessarily going to have this kind

of consciousness simply because of its economic kind of reality. And that

level of determinism, where one thing determines another, is traditionally

called "historical materialism." So Marxist

theory is usually referred to as historical materialism, although this is

not a term that Marx used so much as how his theory has often been labeled.

That's the basic idea of how economics then affects the rest of life.

The problem, though, is what do we do with literature. We know that literature is

part of the superstructure, and we know that those people who control

society--those who have most power--they tend to want to keep the status quo. They

don't really want change, and change typically comes from the base.

There's technological innovation over time that changes the relations of

production, all of these kinds of different things, and eventually there's

a crisis and then there's this kind of revolutionary change which leads to a

new epoch or a new era. So we know that change primarily comes from the base,

although somehow it's also reflected in the superstructure. And we can talk then

about literature as somehow reflecting the economic conditions of the time -- just

like everything else does (theology and law and so on). But that can be a bit of a

naive theory of history, and Marx tended to be a little bit naive

about how literature related to economics, He tended to call literature

simply propaganda, so literature then is a kind of propaganda.

It's appropriate for the ruling classes. They write a literature

that they like and that they want the masses to enjoy. If you

think for instance about a feudal society, so a medieval kind of society, we

have lots and lots of stories about knights doing brave things and usually

rescuing peasants from a bad fate. You can definitely see there that Marx

is right -- that there is a sense in which those who control the production of

literature create literature that's in their own favor, that paints them

in a positive light. But there is some problem with this because literature is

often also very revolutionary and how do we account for this? Well, Marx had some

trouble with this and as soon as you start thinking about history and

historical change you can see some of the problems he runs into. So let's think

about this in relation to history then. Let's say that we have a number of

historical epochs in a row here, and we can give names to these. Marx famously

said that the most important epochs are the feudal epoch, the capitalist epoch,

and then that would eventually lead to communism of course,

although we haven't quite seen that successfully. Within these different

epochs we can also talk about specific eras. We can talk about late

capitalism if we want. So we might split this up even more. But let's let's just

talk very broadly about a larger epoch. Well, in this particularly epoch we could

talk about what's referred to as a kind of hegemony ... sometimes also

hegemony [with a hard "g"] -- depends on who you talk to. A hegemony is that dominance

culturally and socially of one group over another. That can be through culture, it

can be through politics, it can be through all sorts of things. But hegemony

is this kind of domination through discourse and through

law and and so on. How does that work if there's only one dominant group? Well

then it would indeed be propaganda. But what happens over time when you have

this kind of contestation, when people are fighting with each other?

If literature is somehow propaganda, if literature is over here, then as soon as

there's this kind of crisis point what happens? Marx tended to say that

literature takes a little while to catch up. So if we think of literature as kind

of catching up, then he called this a "lag." There's a lag historically, and

literature shows people's consciousness of what happens, but it should sort of

shows it after the fact. So let's say this moment of crisis happens, then the

literature will start reflecting that crisis kind of after the fact

historically and it sort of takes a little bit to catch up. Okay, well you can

see that that's probably not very satisfactory. It's kind of a lousy

explanation, and later Marxists were at pains to kind of clarify this and to

create a better explanation. So I'm just going to give one example of a Marxist

who came up with a different explanation, and this Marxist is Raymond Williams ...

a 20th century Marxist and cultural critic.

He tried to update what Marx was saying but in terms of literature. So let's see what

he says. Raymond Williams argues that within any

kind of society, so we think about history again ... within any society we

actually have multiple hegemonies, and that sort of solves the problem. He

called these hegemonies the dominant hegemony ... so the dominant hegemony is the

kind of social and cultural discourse and power and so on of the

ruling class, the class that is dominant, and so we can talk about the dominant

hegemony. That's going to take up most of the field in terms of what's

visible through culture and entertainment and all of these other

things. But then we also have a kind of residual

hegemony. A residual hegemony is what's left over from the previous era.

These are the traditional conservative people let's

say within a society, who are clinging on to something that's still from

the past. And then we also have some people who are part of a kind of

emergent hegemony, and this is the more revolutionary kind of thinking

and this eventually may well well become the new dominant hegemony. This is the

future dominant hegemony in a new epoch. And so we can see all of these

things in tension with each other. The dominant hegemony might have more

power and influence. They control the media, let's say, but we also have the

emergent hegemony -- particular working classes let's say -- and they might produce

and print their own materials, they might create their own TV shows. ... They may not

have the same access to resources but they are challenging the dominant

hegemony. And now we can see that literature then fits into these

different patterns. Some types of literature are reflective of the

dominant class, the dominant viewpoint. Some are residual, some are emergent. Now

Raymond Williams is really great at sort of pointing out the fascinating

paradoxes and tensions that arise from this. For instance, just to give

one example, if we think of the concept of tradition, where does tradition

fit in? Tradition could be the literary canon, the decision about

who fits in with the great writers of the past. The tradition could be

something like a monument to a past hero. It could be all sorts of things. Well who

controls that? We might think the traditional aspect of culture is

controlled by the residual hegemony, but that's not the case according to Raymond

Williams. He says it's the dominant hegemony that controls tradition because

they decide what they would like to keep from the past and what's important.

And so we see how even through these kind of interesting ways power is

exerted. This is a quite a complicated view of culture then, and there's one

more aspect we need to add. This is the aspect of consent. Because of

course with propaganda, propaganda is from the top down, and propaganda

then is as we said a naive view of looking at literature because if there

is a revolutionary aspect, if people are thinking and clashing and so on, then

it's not as if propaganda is always just from the top down. That's where consent

comes into the picture a little bit and this notion of consent was first really

explored by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. In fact, Raymond

Williams gets a lot of his ideas from Antonio Gramsci. And Gramsci pointed out

that within a hegemony there's often an element of consent.

We don't just coercively force people to believe in a certain idea. We want

to convince them to some extent, and we also hold out a kind of carrot.

We kind of say, well, this will entice you, this will make it more

palatable. Just to give one example, and this is just my own example here, but

let's say you take the films that feature James Bond. So

we have James Bond -- he is the kind of great hero. He rescues the damsel in

distress. It's basically the feudal romance updated. He rescues the world, he

saves all of us. But who is he? Why do we want to look up to him?

He is ultimately the rich aristocrat. He is the one who has the fancy cars, he

dresses nicely, he's suave and elegant, and he knows how to speak well. Is this

somebody that we can aspire to, that we can attain to? Maybe not. Maybe our

economic reality is such that we cannot actually afford any of this. But why do

we go out and watch it then? Why do we give our consent? Why do we take part

[in] what you might call [an] expression of the dominant hegemony.

Because that's what James Bond probably is. It's really a kind of expression of

capitalism you might say -- all of the forces of capitalism. And that's what

a Marxist critic like Raymond Williams would point out. So we now have a more

complicated picture of what literature and entertainment does then in relation

to the base, the economic base, and we can see then that there is this kind of

influence from the base to the superstructure, but within the

superstructure there are these really interesting and fascinating tensions

between different cultural viewpoints. In a different movie we'll have a

look at how William Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" expresses some

of those kinds of tensions.