Anne Mcclintock, "Imperial Leather Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Co...

Imperial Leather by Anne McClintock explores the connection between race, gender, sexuality, class, and psychoanalysis in material history. The book moves through three distinct moments, from the height of British imperialism in the UK to the contemporary hopes of dismantling the master's house in South Africa. The book is a rich source of insights for anyone working on colonialism and its lingering traces in the postcolonial present. McClintock interrogates the concept of postcolonial, viewing it as eliding the complexities of global power not readily marshaled into the binary of colonizer and colonized. Race, gender, and class are not just separate structures but articulated categories, conflictual and complicit.

In graphic illustration, McClintock reads Sir Henry Rider Haggard's map in King Solomon's Mines (1885) and finds that the sexualized "lay of the land" and the mounds covered in dark heather mark the entrance to the treasure cave. The unknown, the female body, is also seen as a space of threat and terror. Theodore Galle's engravings of America as a naked, inviting woman are seen as signs of male imperial power feminizing terra incognita, with cannibals and indigenous women spitroasting a human leg. The psychoanalytic potential of these primal scenes is abundant, and McClintock exploits them to the full, highlighting male fears of dismemberment and emasculation shadowing imperial exploration.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gendered exploratory tropes circulated back home, not just in the imperial office and men's clubs but also in Victorian dominance. Commodity spectacles traversed the allegedly separate spheres of private life and imperial market. Advertisements for Globe Polish and Pear's Soap depicted whiteness and cleanliness, but imperial presumptions of anachronistic space and panoptical time. Women, colonized, and workers were rendered regressive, that is, anachronistic "before" history.

In the panopticon of the Crystal Palace (1851), the globe was envisioned as one time, human races were represented as "trees," or as a "family of man," thus naturalizing and masculinizing racial hierarchy. Such presumptions are found not just in popular advertisements, cartoons, and postcards but in the grand narratives of scientists like Sir Francis Galton, Paul Broca, Friedrich Engels, and Georg W. F. Hegel. Irish were depicted with dark, simian contours as "white Negroes," sunk in torpor and domestic degeneracy. Workers were portrayed as darkened and degenerate, and even working-class women were seen as akin to black men.

McClintock explores these complicities of race, sex, and class through the history of a protracted clandestine liaison between Hannah Cullwick, maidservant and later secret wife, and Arthur Munby, barrister, poet, and photographer of Victorian Britain. McClintock claims that his obsession with "inspecting" working women-domestic servants, milkmaids, sack makers, fisherwomen, and the mining women of Wigan Pit-was born of his infatuation with his powerful nurse. She long refused him marriage and children, preferring paid to unpaid domestic work and the pleasures and freedoms of life "downstairs."

Metropolis and colony were connected by the "double crossings" of commodities, as goods and as signs. Imperial progress became a commodity spectacle, with images of black children becoming "almost white" with Pears soap or Monkey-Brand soap crossing the threshold from the jungles of Africa to the British doorstep. In this "domestication," women's dirty work and that of the colonized are alike effaced.

Olive Schreiner's biographies connect colonial and metropolitan cultural contexts, but her antiracist politics were compromised by the use of racial stereotypes in her stories. Her books, most notably, The Story ofan African Farm, evoked a sense of exile, transcended by a mystical union with feminized nature.

The final section of the book explores the politics of colonial and contemporary South Africa, focusing on the iconography of the mother in Afrikaner and African nationalism. McClintock discusses the book The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (1980), which was a scandal in South Africa due to its story of an African woman's violent struggle to survive apartheid and its uncertain authorship. She argues that dialogics resurface in the awkward shifts of tense, person, and voice in the telling, and ultimately, the "we" of Poppie's community of women is the voice that prevails. This collective first person, often applied to the life histories of women, working-class men, and people of color, is read as a challenge to Eurocentric literary norms.

Cultural contests about style are related to the broader politics of social transformation in South Africa. Resistance poetry and African performance works were often dismissed by white critics as unliterary, drawing on indigenous orality as much as English literature. McClintock plots a movement from the styles of Sophiatown and the journal Drum to rural and urban shebeens where Sotho praise poetry was refashioned in performances. Both proved a threat to the white state, and Soweto poetry emerged in the context of the movement for Black Consciousness, inflected by jazz and jive and Black American registers.

Imperial Leather is often brilliant but also copious, not quite connected, and a bit uneven, especially in effecting the aspired mutual engagement between psychoanalysis and material history. While psychoanalysis is deployed in analyzing Freud's banishing of his nurse/nanny from his oedipal family romances, the fetishism and cross-dressing of Cullwick and Munby, and the biography and books of Haggard and Schreiner, it virtually disappears in discussing contemporary South Africa. Daniels's Puritans at Play is engaging, combining the anecdotal richness of classic New England chroniclers with insights drawn from some of the best standard works of Puritan scholarship.

 

Elizabeth V Spelman, "Inessential Woman:Problems of Exclusion in Feminis...

Inessential Woman by Elizabeth Spelman challenges the common belief in feminism that race and class are integral to gender, arguing that attention to these issues is a requirement of the concept of gender itself. Spelman's key contribution is to show that we have not acted on what we said we believed, but rather did not know what we thought we knew - how to think about gender. She unpacks the requirements, insights, and methodologies of feminist theories themselves, demonstrating that understanding our gender relations requires understanding the way we have constructed the relation between blacks and whites, owners and workers, and the genders of subordinated groups.

The book's impact comes not from its familiarity but from its excellence in content. It encourages white middle-class feminists to inquire into their knowledge and actions, showing that understanding gender relations requires understanding the constructions of race and gender. Spelman also raises questions about the influence of Plato in some versions of feminism. The book's third chapter on Simone de Beauvoir demonstrates that holding race and class constant to isolate gender oppression misunderstands the nature of gender and reinforces the privilege of white middle-class women.

Spelman discusses the role of early childhood experiences in shaping gender identity and hierarchy. She argues that gender is a social construction, and early childhood experiences are crucial for this construction. Spelman contends that in a racist society, children must learn that the rules of domination and subordination are different in relation to white and black women. Racism is embedded in the original learning of gender, not extrapolated from it.

To fully understand the importance of early childhood experiences in learning gender identity and hierarchy, more research is needed to understand the mechanisms of this learning, including issues of sequence, language, and consciousness. Spelman also argues that gender cannot be constructed independently of race due to the nature of racism in America. She provides glimpses of how the gender of both blacks and whites is shaped by racism and how racism is interpenetrated by sexism.

Despite her persuasive argument that race must be integral to gender, Spelman does not provide specific answers to questions about how women of color view issues like violence against women and reproductive rights.

Spelman argues that understanding gender through the intersecting repressions of society is crucial for addressing the intersection of race, class, and sexism in society. She highlights the importance of understanding gender through the intersecting repressions of society, such as the imbalance between race and class.

Wendell Berry has explored the harms of racism, including how it shapes both blacks' and whites' experiences of sexuality. The movie Working Girl offers an effective picture of the differences between the way gender is constructed for upper middle-class professional women and for the "working girls" who are their secretaries. However, the gentle challenge it poses to the interpenetrating oppression of gender and class is offered in the context of reinforcing one of the lynchpins of patriarchy: the upper-class prince charming hero without whom all the heroine's efforts would have failed.

Spelman's work on gender and race is a complex exploration of the intersections of power, privilege, and advantage in societies. She argues that society systematically accords different advantages based on various factors such as religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, and more. She raises questions about whether the problem of infinite fracturing can be contained by focusing only on those forms of diversity that are part of a hierarchical ordering of power resulting in oppression.

The concept of who counts as white or "of color" is contested, with some Jewish women claiming they are not white. Gloria Anzaldua suggests that this self-categorization does not necessarily mean that Jewish women are women of color. Racial categories are socially constructed, and there can be no simple "truth" as to who is really white or "of color." Working through the conflict helps clarify how racial categories are constructed in society, how they may interfere with our capacities to hear one another, and how they can best be used or deconstructed to understand and overcome oppression. Feminist theory emphasizes the importance of embracing multiplicity and challenging categorization to better understand the diverse stories of oppression experienced by women of color. Spelman's insights highlight the deep challenges feminism raises for conventional understandings of law and theory, as it disrupts conventional categories and undermines the identity among human beings. Feminist theory insists that we cannot know the things we most need to know about people for the purposes of political theory or practice unless we treat their embodiedness and affective dimensions as central.

Spelman's insights emphasize the challenges feminism presents for conventional understandings of law and theory. By celebrating difference and making diversity central to all inquiries, we can challenge conventional categories and undermine the identity among human beings. The infinite regress of specificity in legal and political theorists raises questions about the foundation for shared rights and the common ground for characterizations of people as bearers of rights. Feminist theory demands making particularity, context, and diversity central, being wary of generalization, paying attention to a multiplicity of voices and perspectives without assuming they fit into any preconceived category, and expecting disruption of categories linked to privilege.

In practice, the impact of diversity can lead to groups of feminists fracturing along intersecting oppressions, such as race, sexual orientation, language, and class. However, genuine solidarity remains a real possibility. The author discusses the disruptive implications of infinite multiplicity and its impact on the pursuit of equality, arguing that focusing on the sameness of individuals is not the only way to achieve this goal. The author acknowledges the mistaken forms of generalization engaged in by white middle-class feminists and emphasizes the importance of recognizing and respecting differences among individuals to achieve equality and mutual respect.

Multiplicity is crucial in communication and collective agreement, as our models of agreement are based on the unity of reason. However, recognizing and allowing for the affective dimension of communication can jar the theoretical basis for unity necessary for deliberation and let loose the anger of those excluded. This problem is even more acute for adjudication, where the norms of impartiality and universality are at their strongest.

To achieve impartiality, our understanding of impartiality must change if the presupposition of unity is lost in taking diversity seriously. The common law model of the judge and two parties assumes that truth will emerge from listening to different perceptions, but this model has limits, as it still premised on the possibility of a neutral arbiter applying neutral rules.

The embrace of multiplicity presents pressing problems in both the long and short terms. In the long term, a new unity may emerge that incorporates diversity, embodiedness, and affect. Feminist theory emphasizes the end of hierarchical oppression, making human wholeness possible by ending the arbitrary division of human capacities according to gender, race, and class.

 

Glen A Love, "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism" (Summary)

Arnold Toynbee, an English historian, argued that the present biosphere is the only habitable space and that mankind has the power to make it uninhabitable if the global population does not take prompt and vigorous concerted action to check pollution and toxic pollution caused by short-sighted industrial greed. In the intervening decade, little has been done to address these ecological issues, leading to an uninhabitable earth. The catalogue of actual and potential horrors is familiar to us, including threats of nuclear holocaust, radiation poisoning, germ warfare, the alarming growth of the world's popular population, global warming, destruction of the planet's protected areas, overcutting of the world's last remaining great forests, critical loss of topsoil and groundwater, overfishing and toxic poisoning of oceans, inundation in our own garbage, and an increasing rate of extinction of plant and animal species.

However, instead of confronting these ecological issues, we prefer to think on other things, such as mass culture and literary research. In the face of profound threats to our biological survival, we continue to celebrate the self-aggrandizing ego and place self-interest above public interest, even in matters of common survival. The English profession has failed to significantly address the issue of environmental degradation, which is a critical concern for our survival. The problem-solving strategies of the past have been increasingly ineffective, and we have grown accustomed to living with crises and outliving them.

Contemporary "deep" ecologists argue that we must break through our preoccupation with mediating only human issues and focus on the ecological systems that must absorb its impact. Theodore Roszak states that our economic style is too great, too fast, and reckless for the ecological systems that must absorb its impact. The distinction between literature and these issues of the degradation of the environment is often overlooked, with the exception of certain categories such as "nature writing," "regionalism," or "interdisciplinary studies." Joseph Meeker's book, "The Comedy of Suruiual: Studies in Literary Ecology," offers a new reading of literature from an ecological viewpoint, arguing that literature should be examined carefully and honestly to discover its influence upon human behavior and the natural environment, determine its role in the welfare and survival of mankind, and offer insight into human relationships with other species and the world around us.

The text discusses the disciplinary revaluation of literature and its role in addressing public concerns. It highlights the need for a redefinition of what is significant on earth, as human rights extend to the non-human world. Ecoconsciousness is a particular contribution of regional literature, nature-writing, and other ignored forms that do not seem to respond to anthropocentric assumptions and methodologies.

The pastoral mode, which traditionally posits a green world where sophisticated urbanites retreat to learn from nature, is in need of reassessment due to its anthropocentric assumptions. The green world becomes a highly stylized and simplified creation of humanistic assumptions, distorting the true essence of each. The author suggests that the lasting appeal of pastoral is a testament to our instinctive or mythic sense of our ancestors as creatures of natural origins, who must return periodically to the earth for the rootholds of sanity denied by civilization.

Western American literature provides some appropriate versions of pastoral, such as Joseph Wod Krutch, a latter-day western writer who lived in New York City and wrote extensively on the natural world. Krutch argued that contemporary science had sucked dry modern life of its moral and spiritual values, and went on to become a scientist of a natural world in which he found many of the values he had presumed to be lost. He became a writer of natural history who, under the influence of Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, came to reassess his dualistic view of man's nature.

In conclusion, the text highlights the need for a reevaluation of pastoral in terms of a more complex understanding of nature and the importance of reevaluating the anthropocentric assumptions that underlie it. By doing so, we can better understand and appreciate the complex interplay between nature and human society.

Krutch's understanding of ego-consciousness evolved from ego-consciousness to eco-consciousness, as he realized that mankind's ingenuity had outpaced its wisdom. His investigation of the paradox of Man, who is a pafi of nature yet can become what he is only by being something also unique, led him to expand his vision of what is significant. This realization came to mean more to him than he realized and summed up a kind of pantheism which was gradually coming to be an essential part of the faith.

The tug of eco-consciousness as a corrective to ego-consciousness is a familiar feature of western work, as it is in the great preponderance of those considered "western writers" by birthright or long association. Much of what it means to be a western writer is to reject the contemptuous epithet, nature-lover.

Pastoralism in American literature has been a subject of debate and analysis, with Freud, Fromm, and Shepard arguing that a society can be sick due to the neurosis shared by millions of people. The literature of the American West constitutes a kind of reflective, as demonstrated by Harold P. Simonson's work "Hortology of the West." Recent studies of pastoral ideology reveal its pervasive appeal in American literature, with Leo Marx acknowledging its relevance but underestimating its significance. Lawrence Buell explores the experience of American pastoral in various frames and contexts, including social, political, gender-based, aesthetic, pragmatic, and environmental.

The emerging threat of ecological holocaust may increase the importance of pastoral as a literary and cultural force in the future. An ideology framed in such terms, with human participants taking their own place in and recognizing their obligation to the shared natural world, will be an appropriate pastoral construct for the future. The redefinition of pastoral requires that contact with the green world be acknowledged as something more than a temporary excursion to simplicity, which exists primarily for the sake of its eventual renunciation and return to the "real" world at the end. A pastoral for the present and the future calls for a better science of nature, a greater understanding of its complexity, a more radical awareness of its primal energy and stability, and a more acute questioning of the values of the supposedly sophisticated society to which we are bound.

The Western Literature Association (WLA) is poised to lead a critical shift in the literature profession, focusing on the integration of human with natural cycles of life. This shift could be influenced by ecological perspectives, such as racism and sexism, which are already being addressed in our pedagogy and theory. As the discipline of literary criticism retreats from public life into a professionalism characterized by its obscurity and inaccessibility, it is essential to begin asking fundamental questions about ourselves and the literature we profess.

The growing interest in nature writing is not limited to the American West, as writers and scholars from this region have been at the forefront of recent publications on nature writing. Ecological issues are both regional and global, transcending political boundaries. Deb Lylder has suggested an international meeting of the WLA, with significant participation from scholars in other countries, to examine and explore the literary-ecological connections raised here.

The most important function of literature today is to redirect human consciousness to a full consideration of its place in a threatened natural world. Nature writing, literature of place, regional writing, and regional writing of nature flourish now, even as it is ignored or denigrated by most other criticism.

Dietrich Harth, "The Invention of Cultural Memory" (Summary)

American literature has a minority tradition of landscape writing that counters the values of progress, development, and improvement celebrated by a dominant tradition. Marginalized writings have become increasingly important to us because they serve as a hedge against social change and rescue the dominant culture in difficult times. One major shift in our scientific world view in the twentieth century has been to recognize the importance of systems and relationships in the phenomenal world. We have begun to recognize that an entity is largely created and undergoes change by its interaction with other entities. The hope for absolute, discrete, and unchangeable essence has disappeared, replaced by Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, chaos theory, and such sciences as ecology. More recently, many have celebrated the rise of a holistic world view that is more compatible with ecological discoveries than Cartesian dualism.

Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin has incorporated much of the thinking about systems and relationships long ago embraced by the hard sciences into his literary theories. His work provides an ideal starting point for an ecological analysis of landscape writing. Bakhtin's theories might be seen as the literary equivalent of ecology, the science of relationships. The ideal form to represent reality is a dialogical form, one in which multiple voices or points of view interact. This dialogue among differing points of view gives value to a variety of socio-ideological positions. An ecological literary criticism could explore how authors have represented the interaction of both human and nonhuman voices in the landscape.

Dialogics in landscape writing can be applied to explore the anthropocentric nature of our time and the values we place on representation. However, there are varying degrees of egoism, and some writers attempt to dissolve their egos and enter the private worlds of different entities in the landscape. This self-reflexive stance rejects the duplicity that often leads viewers to believe that extreme close-up or telephoto shots with no humans in sight is the real nature.

Another problem in applying dialogics to landscape writing is the marked absence of human society in much of the writing. While it might seem that the application of Bakhtin's theory would become questionable, he argues that wherever there is a human voice, there is evidence of other human beings because we are each a result of our interaction with others. Language is necessarily a social construct, and the language we write carries evidence of social values, which are capable of expressing themselves.

A dialogical analysis of landscape literature emphasizes the intertextuality of a text, as it answers other texts within its genre. For Bakhtin, genre is always collectivive, indicating social forces at work. Landscape writing tends to incorporate a variety of genres, and the history of literatre is the struggle between the novel and other already-existing genres.

American literature often portrays the sameness of urban life across the United States and Canada to establish a connection with the reader, leading to an increasingly conformist society. This is ideal for an approved, "official" literature that bulldozes local hillsides to make a homogeneous American literature. Bakhtin's idea of the chronotope encourages us to recover the representation of place in even works of "essential noninterest in the land." The chronotope binds together elements of story, geography, and self, reminding us of the local, vernacular, folk elements of literature, which are rooted in place.

Bakhtin questions the significance of these chronotopes and answers that they are the organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. This critique of American literature needs to address the interconnections of time and place in narrative to avoid creating a conformist society and a homogeneous American literature. Analyzing landscape in narrative becomes not only a key to understanding how we have viewed the relationship of humans and nature but also a key to understanding at least some of the meanings of a narrative.

Historically, a change occurred in how nature was perceived, from something in which we participate to landscape, which is "nature conceived as horizon" and "environment. Picturesque remnants of nature became "scenes" or "views," and what is important to humans began to shift to a space that is Josed and private. Then, nature itself became a living participant in the events of life, fragmented into metaphors and comparisons serving to sublimate individual and private affairs and adventures not connected in any real or intrinsic way with nature itself. Much writing today views nature solely as a backdrop to the really important things, which are human marters divorced from a nature that remains "out there."

In contrast, Bakhtin presents the idyllic chronotope, which has been very important in the history of the novel. He identifies the idyll as a model for restoring "folkloric time," the relationship of time and space in the idyll as an organic fastening-down, grafting life and its events to a place. Many familiar English and American literary works would be unrecognizable without their landscapes, such as Thomas Hardy's Wessex, D. H. Lawrence's Midlands, William Cather's prairies, and Robinson Jeffers' Big Sur coast.

The "carnivalistic" tendency in landscape writing has led to a more diverse and accurate representation of the natural world. This approach differs from earlier, more monologic landscape writing, which focused on colonial settlement and dehumanization of real Indians. More recent writers aim to divest themselves of human preconceptions and enter the natural world as animal participants, allowing the landscape to enter them through their writing.

However, the unofficial, folkloric, bodily reality is still the bodily reality of humans, not other creatures. Animals' perceptions and realities are different, and we can try to imitate them by confining our sensory perceptions to those of the animal and imagining the perceptions of those senses in which we are deficient. Bakhtin's thinking on the carnival parallels John Brinckerhoff Jackson's distinction between the "official" and the "vernacular" landscape in his analysis of landscape.

The simplistic "jobs versus environment" arguments often prioritize immediate, short-term economic needs over long-term economic and environmental good. A more romantic official landscape now increasingly forced upon the local experience is a nostalgic landscape of national forests, undammed wild and scenic rivers, unplowed national grasslands, and ungrazed federal wildlife refuges, all of which are nearly peopleless.

Cheryll Burgess's "Toward an Ecological Literary Criticism" presents a useful typology of ecological literary criticism, suggesting four types: images of nature in canonical literature, biographical criticism, theory, and practical application of theoretical ecological concepts to specific rituals.

Some ecologically conscious literary critics also condemn Western civilization for its oppression of nature and all other forms of "the other." They often find answers in Eastern thought or the religious attitudes of primitive peoples, while admiring the best of primitive and Eastern attitudes towards the natural world.

Another tendency in criticism of landscape and nature writing is to discover eternal themes and recurring characters in the literature. While understanding the integration of natural cycles and rhythms in literature is important, the author avoids the myth and symbol school of criticism due to the leveling and homogenizing effect of such usually ahistorical approaches.

Ecological literary criticism addresses various concerns related to the representation of landscape in literature. One such concern is srylistic, which explores the implications of metaphors used in writing. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors' Way By provides a fundamental analysis of the implications of metaphors in writing. Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land is one of the best models for analyzing metaphors specifically related to landscape.

Mcdowell explores how landscape writers have modified existing genres and modes, such as pastoral literature, to incorporate a more accurate understanding of the complex relationships within nature. Critics argue that pastoral literature has been criticized for its benign, simplified, and citified view of the natural world, while others like Joan Tetterly point to it as an ageless form of environmental literature and the repository of ideas about humankind's place in nature.

Mcdowell discusses the challenges faced by landscape writers in breaking out of the prisonhouse of genre and hybridizing new forms, genres, and modes. They argue that a freer heuristic "anatomy" of views of humanity in nature is needed, as it allows for a more flexible attention to views of humans in nature. The beauty and strength of landscape writing, as demonstrated by Silko's Ceremony and Storyteller, are due to its ability to absorb many other genres.

A third concern in the practical application of ecological criticism is the ways landscape writers have enabled a dialogical interplay of voices in contradictory and contradictory ways. The best landscape writers suppress their egos and give voices to the many elements of a landscape by using techniques that Bakhtin identifies and praises in his discussions of nineteenth-century novels.

Mcdowell suggests that the environment creates characters or characters, so studying the environment with which a character interacts will reveal much about the character. An exploration of the dialogic voices in a landscape leads naturally to an analysis of the values a writer has recognized as inherent in a landscape, rather than imposed upon it. Analyzing the values a particular writer has allowed to adhere to their descriptions and narrations can help understand the integral relationship between value and landscape.

 

Stuart Hall, "The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of K...

The concept of "ideology" has been largely descriptive and not fully absorbed into Anglo-Saxon social theory. However, in the 1950s, Robert Merton's essays on "The Sociology of Knowledge" and "Karl Mannheim" marked a rediscovery of the concept for American social science. Marxism is the storm center of "Knowledgesociologie," with its formulations primarily found in the writings of Marx and Engels. However, the concept of ideology was never rigorously applied to this promising area of work.

Roger Bacon called for a thoroughgoing investigation and critique of conventional wisdom, while Helvetius suggested that our ideas are the necessary consequence of societies. Most recent overviews agree that the term ideology originated with the group of savants in the French Revolution who were entrusted with the founding of a new center of revolutionary thought. They compromised with Napoleon Bonaparte for the sake of ideas, but by 1803, they abandoned them, destroying the Institut's core.

Despite the disbanding of this group, the interest in ideology did not entirely disappear. Destutt de Tracy inaugurated a "natural history of ideas," treating the history of the contents and evolution of the human mind as a species of zoology. However, his work was shadowed by contradictions, revealing its true Enlightenment roots.

Ideology refers to the role of ideas and the idea that they are not self-sufficient and their roots lie elsewhere. The study of ideas holds the promise of a critique of idealism, as it helps explain how ideas arise. However, the study of ideas requires immense theoretical labor to prevent it from drifting into idealism. This dilemma is evident in the history of Kant's tradition, which critiqued the abstract Enlightenment notion of "Reason" and asserted the primacy of the structures and categories of "mind" over matter.

Hegel, a rival to Kant, aimed to heal the Kantian division of the world into knowledge of things and things in themselves. Hegel's method for overcoming this discontinuity was the dialectic, proposing a specific conception of the relation between knowledge and the world, mind and matter, and Idea and History.

Feuerbach and the Left Hegelians followed him, focusing on unmasking the human and sensuous roots of religious ideas. Marx advanced a materialist theory of ideology, arguing that historical concepts possess true generality because they relate to a universal agent that unfolds through the histories of particular peoples and civilizations.

The transformation of the problem of "ideologies" into the study of Weltanschauungen constitutes something like the dominant tradition in German thought for most of the nineteenth century. Lukács's work, The Soul and Its Forms and The Theory of the Novel, are directly Hegelian and Diltheyean in inspiration. Lucien Goldmann forms the theoretical basis of The Hidden God, giving it a further Marxist or sociohistorical gloss.

The relationship between Protestantism and capitalism is a significant topic in Marxist theory, with both Marx and Engels pointing to the connection. In the German historicist school, R. H. Tawney and Christopher Hill emphasize the importance of considering the role of ideology and religion in analyzing the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the seventeenth century. Marxism breaks with the expressive totality central to the Geisteswissenschaft approach by addressing the full complexity of social formations and not assuming a "given" or immediate correspondence between levels. Ideologies are not self-sufficient but are not empty or false forms, making them an important area of analysis for Marxism.

The Protestant Ethic is an intellectual tour de force that argues that the structure of Puritan ideas and the rationalization of capital accumulation are essential for the development of capitalism. It opposes the notion that economic change directly provides the content of capitalist ideas and suggests that the "homology" between capitalism and Puritanism is more important. Ideologies can create an inner compulsion in a class by pointing to the psychological aspect of ideologies without falling into individual psychologism. They have their own complex internal articulation whose specificity must be accounted for.

Capitalism emerged at the level of ideology, not through the gradual erosion and secularization of Catholicism but through the intensified spiritualization of Puritanism. Europe becomes capitalist at the ideological level by setting everything, including man's worldly activity, directly under God's supervision. Max Weber's work could be rescued from his argument without doing violence to his argument.

The struggle over method in the 20th century led to the development of irrationalism, which emerged as a response to the polarization of positivism and historicism. This impulse was rooted in German Romanticism and resurfaced again in European thought in the form of Vitalism, where Nietzsche believed that there was no guiding philosophy or method left. Max Weber's response to this idea was to construct sociological concepts heuristically in terms of typical actions, meanings, and orientations ascribed to typical individual actors. Alfred Schutz, a phenomenologist, attempted to develop a more rigorous sociological approach from this Weberian synthesis, arguing that all that could be "known" consisted of the contents and structures of consciousness, and that meaning was the product of intention.

The sociology of knowledge, developed by Schutz, has evolved to focus on social relations as structures of knowledge, treating knowledge in its widest everyday sense and not confusing it with systematic ideas. Marxist theory of ideology, which focuses on the historical development of society, has a different problematic than phenomenology, which assumes that historical reality is based on what men say, imagine, and conceive.

Durkheim, the "father" of positive social science, focused on analyzing patterns of social interaction governed by norms and institutional structures. He believed that social phenomena had a reality of their own and must be analyzed using rigorous methods. Durkheimean positivism selfconsciously closed itself off from the Subject-Object dialectic introduced by Hegel, which began with already objectivated social reality and treated the "knowable" world as a reification. Durkheim belonged to the neo-Kantian tradition, which studied "noumenal" reality through its appearance through "phenomenal" reality.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, emphasized the study of "the life of signs at the heart of social life" as a resumption of the "forgotten part of the Durkheim-Mauss programme." Lévi-Strauss's structuralism was influenced by Marx, Freud, Rousseau, the schools of Prague linguistics and Russian formalism, and the anthropological linguistics of Franz Boas. Lévi-Strauss's first application of structuralism was made to two classical themes of Social Anthropology: kinship systems and totemism.

The key difference between classical and Lévi-Strauss's structuralism lies in the meanings of the term "structure." Classical Social Anthropology understood the observable structures of a society, while Lévi-Strauss viewed it as the underlying system of relations between terms conceptualized on the model of a language. This approach cut down on the notion that men "named" simple functional objects in the real world. Lévi-Strauss believed that understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality to another, and that true reality is never the most objective of realities.

Structuralism is a significant development in the analysis of culture and knowledge, shifting from content to forms or structure. It relates to the arrangement of things and objects in the Australian primitive world through the logic of totemic classification. Structuralist linguistics, particularly Saussure's work on contrastive features of the phonetic system, was crucial in helping Lévi-Strauss develop a method for decoding their production. The basic elementary "move" for structuralism allowed analysts to express cultural significations in terms of the former, transposing them into the classifications, elements, and rules of selection and combination.

The birth of structuralism as a general theory of culture and the structuralist method is considered a "Copernican" revolution in the sociology of knowledge. However, its seminal character has been retrospectively repressed as intellectual fashion has tended to swing away from Lévi-Strauss's work toward other points in the structuralist field. There are at least three lines of descent: the development of a specifically "Marxist structuralism," marked by the work of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, and the two applications of the structuralist method to the field of the semiotic.

 

Alon Confino, "Memory and the History of Mentalities" (Summary)

The intellectual and methodological connections between memory and the history of mentalities have roots in the work of French scholars like Maurice Halbwachs, Marc Bloch, and Pierre Nora. Halbwachs, in his seminal work "Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire" (1925), was the first to systematically explore the concept of collective memory, linking it to specific social groups. His ideas found resonance with Bloch and Lucien Febvre, founders of the Annales school, who advocated for a new kind of history focused on societal structures and "mental tools."

 

The history of mentalities, as pioneered by Febvre and Bloch, introduced a novel approach to studying the past, emphasizing collective representations, beliefs, and emotions. Although lacking a comprehensive theoretical framework, this approach greatly influenced historical scholarship. Nora, a later member of the Annales school, continued this tradition by exploring collective memory in his work, particularly in "Les lieux de mémoire" (1974).

 

However, the evolution of memory studies in recent decades has shifted away from its close association with the history of mentalities, particularly outside of France. Transnational influences, including the growing interest in the Holocaust and cultural studies, have broadened the scope and focus of memory studies. As a result, the link between memory and mentalities has become less prominent in scholarly discourse.

 

Nevertheless, memory studies have significantly enriched our understanding of the past, uncovering new knowledge and challenging existing narratives. For example, research in memory studies has debunked the myth of postwar German silence on the Holocaust, revealing instead a vibrant debate within West German society. Despite its varied interpretations and applications, the concept of memory remains a central theme in cultural history, contributing to ongoing historical exploration and interpretation.

The term "memory" has become somewhat diluted due to its excessive use, and memory studies often lack a clear focus, leading to a sense of predictability. While critical articles on method and theory abound, there is a lack of systematic evaluation of the field's problems, approaches, and objects of study. Memory studies frequently follow a routine formula, investigating yet another event and its associated memories, using terms like "contested," "multiple," and "negotiated," which, while accurate, have become somewhat cliché.

 

In this context, reconnecting memory with the history of mentalities offers a fresh perspective on memory as a notion of historical method and explanation. The history of mentalities shares similarities with memory studies in terms of its purpose, agenda, and cyclical patterns of fashionability and crisis. Like memory studies, the history of mentalities has faced criticism for being overused and lacking clear theoretical frameworks. However, both fields offer valuable insights into collective mentality and societal perceptions of the past.

 

Thinking of memory in association with the history of mentalities encourages scholars to explore broader questions about the role of the past in society. This approach emphasizes the importance of understanding why certain pasts are embraced or rejected by society and how memory shapes behavior and thoughts. It also highlights the need to place memory within a broader historical context that considers the diversity of social times and practices.

 

The fascination with the notions of mentality and memory lies in their ability to expand the territory of historical investigation and challenge traditional assumptions about historical reconstruction. The shift from studying "society" to "culture" and "memory" reflects a broader disciplinary transformation in historical scholarship, emphasizing the historicity of history writing and the construction of collective representations of the past. Overall, reconnecting memory with the history of mentalities offers a more nuanced understanding of collective identity and societal perceptions of the past.

 

 

The second fundamental characteristic shared by mentality and memory is their inherent demand for interpretation. While all historical topics are subject to interpretation, the depth of interpretation required varies significantly. Economic trends in the nineteenth-century British coal industry, for example, may be analyzed through empirical data and statistical methods, requiring rigorous research and analysis. However, the interpretation of Holocaust memory involves a more nuanced understanding of collective representations, narratives, and cultural contexts, which necessitates a different set of analytical tools.

 

Memory and mentality as subjects of historical inquiry reveal the process of constructing the past, thereby shedding light on the historian's practice. This aspect has been instrumental in expanding the scope of historical investigation and driving major interpretative shifts in historical studies. Although this expansion has made the historian's territory less clearly defined and historical analysis less precise, it has also led to the development of new tools, subjects, and questions in historical scholarship.

 

Yet, this expansion also poses risks. Memory and mentality demand interpretation, which can sometimes be oversimplified or superficial. While analyzing coal production data may require extensive research and analysis, the representation of memory may appear self-evident, seemingly speaking for itself. However, this apparent simplicity is deceptive, as memory also requires careful interpretation and interrogation of evidence, narratives, and sources.

 

The challenge for historians is to resist the temptation of facile interpretation and instead engage in rigorous analysis to extract meaning from memory. By employing appropriate methods and theories, historians can navigate the complexities of memory and mentality, allowing these subjects to enrich historical imagination and deepen our understanding of the past, just as they have done for over a century.

 

Judith Butler, "Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics" (Summary)

Gender performativity and precarity are concepts that focus on conditions that threaten life in ways that appear outside of one's control. Gender is performative, meaning it is a certain kind of enactment, often mistaken for its internal truth. Precarity, on the other hand, describes conditions that pertain to living beings, such as the possibility of undoing or redoing norms in unexpected ways, opening up the possibility of a remaking of gendered reality along new lines. Social and political institutions are designed to minimize conditions of precarity, especially within the nation-state. However, precarity is a politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. This can lead to diseases, poverty, starvation, displacement, and exposure to violence without protection. Precarity is directly linked with gender norms, as those who do not live their genders in intelligible ways are at heightened risk for harassment and violence. Gender norms play a role in how we appear in public space, distinguish between public and private spaces, and who will be criminalized based on public appearance.

The concept of power is rooted in the idea that it cannot remain in power without reproducing itself. This means that every act of reproduction risks going awry or adrift, producing effects that are not fully foreseen. The subject, in such contexts, is not a sovereign precondition of action and thought but a socially produced agent and deliberator whose agency and thought is made possible by a language that precedes that "I". Power relies on a mechanism of reproduction that can undo the strategies of animating power and produce new and even subversive effects. This paradox arises in politics, where the subject is not a precondition of politics but a differential effect or power. Sexual and gender norms condition what and who will be "legible" and what and who will not. The performativity of gender is bound up with the differential ways in which subjects become eligible for recognition. The desire for recognition can never be fulfilled, but to be a subject at all requires first complying with certain norms that govern recognition. Non-compliance calls into question the viability of one's life and the ontological conditions of one's persistence.

In May 2006, illegal immigrants in Los Angeles began singing the national anthem of the United States in English and Spanish, and sometimes sang one anthem right after the other. Their aim was to petition the government to allow them to become citizens. However, they were exercising the right of free assembly without having that right, which belongs to citizens. This public performance was an act of asserting the right to free assembly without having it.

There are political battles in California and other states about whether English should be the obligatory language for all public services and schools. Those who defend the "English-only" policies are fearful about the multilingual reality of the public sphere and the cultural presence of the Spanish language. Singing in Spanish asserts the multilingual reality of the public sphere and refuses privatization strategies that require English in the public and relegate other languages to the home.

Singing in Spanish on the street gives voice and visibility to populations that are regularly disavowed as part of the nation, exposing the modes of disavowal through which the nation constitutes itself. In essence, the singing exposes and opposes those modes of exclusion through which the nation imagines and enforces its own unity.

Hannah Arendt's work explores the link between the nation-state and stateless persons, and how those who are stateless can exercise rights even when they are not guaranteed or protected by positive law. Arendt argues that the exercise of rights is not an individual act but rather an action with others, in public and with the sphere of appearance. She believes that the true exercise of freedom comes from social conditions such as place and political belonging, and that the right to have rights should be guaranteed by humanity itself. Arendt asserts that the right to free speech and public freedoms comes into being through its exercise, and that equality is a precondition for making and changing the world. To be a political actor, one must act and petition within the terms of equality, making the "I" a "we" without being fused into an impossible unity. Equality is a condition and character of political action itself, and equality is its goal.

Spivak argues that the borders of the nation-state were established in the service of colonialism, and who counts as a citizen of the nation-state is not answered by pointing to the populations that live within its borders. She argues that the nation-state is brought into being on the backs of stateless peoples, and this is the legacy of colonialism in the making and sustaining of the nation-state. Spivak argues that the nation-state belongs to Europe, but it is not possible to claim the globe as one's place of belonging. She also points out that migrancy and deportation are forcibly regulated throughout the globe, and ideas of hypermobility are based on patterns of mobility within the European Union or between firstworld countries. Spivak also questions the idea that the state represents a given nationality, understood as monolithic and monolingual. She argues that the connection between nation and state is a transient and historically contingent nexus, and that Africa is a place for the experimentation of NGOs and a laboratory for thinking and doing non-nation-centered states.

The text explores the concept of performativity in the context of nation-states and cultural translation. It highlights that a state cannot be considered a single nation, as it can divide populations and force disenfranchised populations together. This creates precarious populations that are exploited by state-sponsored capitalism. The task of cultural translation is crucial for producing alliance in difference and is not a simple multiculturalism.

Spivak argues that indigenous people must acquire dominant languages to be represented by politics and law, and those who fail to do so have no chance to assert rights within recognizable codes. Arendt identifies ideal rights for those without rights, but this way of exercising rights is presumed to work even without supporting conditions.

In subalternity, especially within the Global South, the only way to lay claim to rights is through assimilating to juridical structures that continue to require the effacement and exploitation of indigenous cultures. Translation is a performative exercise that produces a set of connections through language that cannot produce linguistic unity.

To lay claim to rights when one has none, it means translating into the dominant language, exposing and resisting its daily violence, and finding the language through which to lay claim to rights to which one is not yet entitled.

The concept of performativity and precarity is central to understanding the dynamics of public space and citizenship. It is not just about explicit speech acts but also the reproduction of norms that govern the intelligibility of the body in space and time. These norms are conditioned and mediated by social norms, which are made and re-made, sometimes entering into crisis. The theory of gender performativity suggests that norms act on us before we have a chance to act, and when we do act, we recapitulate the norms that act upon us, in relation to norms that precede us and exceed us. This process of being worked on makes its way into our own action.

Gender performativity does not necessarily imply an always acting subject or an incessantly repeating body. It establishes a complex convergence of social norms on the somatic psyche, and a process of repetition that is structured by a complicated interplay of obligation and desire. When political actions are taken, they are already within a set of norms that are acting upon us, and when subversion or resistance becomes possible, it does not necessarily come from a fully deliberate and intentional set of acts.

Gender and sexuality are distinct issues, but they cannot be fully dissociated. Some forms of sexuality are linked to phantasies about gender, and certain ways of living gender require specific sexual practices. There are significant discontinuities between gender norms and normative sexuality, but none of us has the choice to create ourselves ex nihilo. Sexuality is crafted and mobilized by signifiers that none of us actually choose, and we are given over before we decide where and when to give ourselves over. Performativity is a process that implies being acted on in ways we do not always fully understand and of acting in politically consequential ways. Precarious life characterizes such lives who do not qualify as recognizable, readable, or grievable. Queer theory posed questions about how to live with the notion that one's love is not considered love or loss is not considered loss. This differential distribution of grievability ties people in knots without hope of ever becoming undone. The question of how performativity links with precarity can be summarized in questions about how the unspeakable population speaks and makes its claims, what disruption this causes within the field of power, and how they can lay claim to what they require.

 

Harald Welzer, "Communicative Memory" (Summary)

The concept of "communicative memory" originates from a refinement of Maurice Halbwachs's notion of "collective" memory into two distinct forms: "cultural" and "communicative" memory, as proposed by Aleida and Jan Assmann. "Cultural memory" encompasses all knowledge that guides behavior and experience within a society across generations through repeated societal practices and initiations. In contrast, "communicative memory" refers to interactive practices within the tension between individuals' and groups' recall of the past. Unlike "cultural" memory, which maintains a distance from the everyday, "communicative memory" is characterized by its proximity to daily experiences and is bound to living bearers of memory and communicators of experiences. Its temporal horizon shifts in relation to the present, spanning approximately three to four generations.

 

While "cultural memory" is supported by fixed points like texts, rites, monuments, and commemorations, "communicative memory" involves the willful agreement of group members regarding their collective past and its meaning within the identity-specific narrative of the group. Despite their theoretical separation, in practice, the forms and methods of "cultural" and "communicative memory" are interconnected, leading to dynamic changes in cultural memory over time.

 

This classic definition of "communicative memory" primarily focuses on group and societal communicative practices, leaving questions about individual communicative memory and its mediation levels between the social and autobiographical aspects largely unaddressed. However, in practice, these memory forms intermingle, forming the complex landscape of "communicative memory."

 

In addition to these conceptual distinctions, the study of memory and remembering has uncovered the intricate relationship between individual and social memory frameworks. "Social memory" refers to the collective transport and communication of the past and interpretations of the past through non-intentional means. Four media of social memory formation include records, cultural products like plays and films, spaces such as urban planning and architecture, and direct interactions. Each of these media contributes to the transmission and shaping of historical narratives within social contexts, influencing individual consciousness and perception of events. Thus, the interplay between individual experiences, societal frameworks, and cultural products creates a complex network of memory formation and transmission.

 

The city, for both residents and passers-by, appears as a dynamic entity shaped by repeated reconfigurations and overlapping layers of history. Interestingly, what is no longer present often holds a greater influence on memory than what has been built over or reconstructed. Furthermore, experiences of landscapes can vary in memory depending on one's mental and physical state at the time. Kurt Lewin's work on the "war landscape" illustrates how an observer's perception of the environment is influenced by their military actions, with landscapes appearing differently during advances versus retreats.

 

Direct interactions serve as another form of social memory, encompassing communicative practices that either directly involve discussing the past or subtly reference it. Developmental psychology has highlighted the role of "memory talk" in shaping autobiographical memory within shared practices. This communicative actualization of experienced pasts continues throughout life, even when not explicitly discussing the past.

 

These forms of social memory collectively constitute what can be termed an "exogrammatic memory system." Unlike engrams, which represent internal neuronal activation patterns corresponding to memories, exograms refer to external memory content used to cope with current demands and plan for the future. Exograms encompass a wide range of content, including written, oral, symbolic, and habitual forms. This externalization of memory is a crucial aspect of human cognition, providing stable and accessible records that transcend individual existence and personal experience.

 

The evolution of symbolic representation, as highlighted by Merlin Donald, has greatly enriched human cognition by expanding memory storage capabilities. Exograms, in contrast to impermanent engrams, offer stable and virtually unlimited memory records that are consciously accessible and infinitely reformattable. This dual system of internal and external representation distinguishes human consciousness and facilitates unique forms of memory transmission and cultural evolution.

Autobiographical memory serves as a functional system that integrates various memory systems, including procedural memory, priming, perceptual memory, semantic memory, and episodic memory. While episodic and autobiographical memory were previously indistinguishable on the neuronal level, recent empirical evidence suggests that autobiographical memory operates as a socially constituted system, amplifying content rather than altering the functional aspects of episodic memory. It integrates these memory systems into a functional unit, ensuring synchronization between individuals and fluctuating social groups.

 

Our autobiographical memory, which shapes our sense of self, develops through social exchange processes. It not only incorporates content formed in collaboration with others but also relies on social formation for its structural organization. This memory system, central to our identity, guides our actions based on intuitive associations, often outside our conscious control. It synthesizes our individual autonomy with our dependence on social entities and our physical bodies, creating a seamless continuity in our self-perception across time and situations.

 

This ego, rooted in our life history and shared memory community, is a self-misunderstanding, yet a necessary and meaningful one. As Hans-Georg Gadamer suggested, autobiography "reprivatizes" history, emphasizing that we belong to history rather than it belonging to us. Our self-concept, shaped by Western individualism, masks our deep connection to others, both close and distant, underscoring our unique yet interconnected existence.

 

Autobiographical memory plays a crucial role in ontogeny, facilitating the synchronization of individuals with their social environment. Individualization and socialization are concurrent processes, shaping one's identity within a co-evolutionary environment. As humans adapt to their ever-changing social and cultural contexts, autobiographical memory serves as a relay, ensuring coherence and continuity amidst fluctuating social demands.

 

This desire for continuity extends beyond individual wishes, as social groups and societies rely on the consistent identity of their members for cooperation and cohesion. Norbert Elias highlighted the importance of understanding human psycho- and sociogenesis within the context of a pre-existing human form shaped by cultural and social evolution. Development psychologists such as Lev Vygotsky, Daniel Stern, and Michael Tomasello emphasize that humans learn to function within their societies through interaction and social learning, rather than through internalization.

The developmental trajectory of memory unfolds from the social realm to the individual sphere, transitioning from an early stage where infants lack autobiographical memory and perceive things as they are to a stage where preschoolers gradually comprehend the self in relation to time. Through language and cognitive development, individuals evolve into autobiographical selves that integrate past and future experiences into a cohesive life story, blending social and individual elements.

 

The regulation of a child's behavior, initially guided by caregivers, gradually transitions to self-regulation. Autobiographical memory serves as a declaratively accessible form of self-regulation, while other memory systems provide implicit forms of regulation, accessible situationally.

 

Ontogenetic development involves two transformations: historical changes in perception, communication, and upbringing practices, and individual changes in relationships with others and oneself. Autobiographical memory, primarily constituted externally, requires constant reinforcement from social interactions. This external aspect is often overlooked due to an individualistic self-image, yet it significantly contributes to the full capacity of human memory.

 

Communicative memory encompasses various cognitive processes that operate unconsciously during interactions. These processes include language decoding, logical reasoning, semantic interpretation, and memory retrieval. While these operations occur swiftly and flexibly, they typically do not enter consciousness unless misunderstandings arise. The unconscious plays a vital role in human existence by facilitating efficient and free conscious action.

 

Conscious communicative practices involve the attribution of meaning to social interactions, with individuals inferring intentions and actions of others in real-time. Emphasizing the emotional dimension and atmospheric nuances of narratives, communicative practices often shape the interpretation of past events more than the events themselves. Both individual and collective narratives are continuously reshaped in response to new experiences and present needs, reflecting the functional value of the past for future orientations and options.

 

Memory and the act of remembering are inherently interdisciplinary fields, particularly when considering that only humans possess autobiographical memory, which must be learned, and that memory has both a biological basis and cultural content. Interdisciplinary projects, like those studying age-specific memory development, have already produced initial findings, with more expected to follow. However, there may be a shift towards the genesis of a new sub-discipline, potentially termed "social neuroscience," which would integrate various disciplines' findings into a cohesive framework.

 

The current state of research reveals varying levels of sophistication and theoretical approaches across disciplines. Neuroscience tends to focus on individual brain function, lacking perspectives from social interaction and communication theories. Conversely, humanities and social sciences often discuss memory formation without considering fundamental bio-social factors. Bridging these gaps is essential, especially in disciplines like life-writing research and oral history, which rely on subjective evidence but could benefit from insights from neuroscientific memory research.

 

One challenge in current research is the international heterogeneity of the field. While German-language discourse on memory is highly synthesized, the Anglo-American realm lags behind. Additionally, memory research in the humanities and social sciences tends to be politically and normatively contextualized, leading to variations in concepts and terminologies across nations. In contrast, neuroscientific research is more consistent internationally but may not fully account for the constitutive conditions of memory or the implications of its findings.

 

Ultimately, the essence of Communicative Memory may never be fully comprehended through scientific analysis alone. Aesthetic approaches, such as literary autobiographies and films, often provide deeper insights into Communicative Memory, as they are not constrained by the need for scientific proof and verification. These artistic mediums offer a unique perspective that complements scientific research in understanding the complexities of memory and remembering.

 

Donna J. Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (Summary)

Raymond Williams, 4. Ideology (Marxism and Literature)

The concept of 'ideology' is an essential aspect of almost all Marxist thinking about culture, literature, and ideas. It can be divided into three common versions: (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group; (ii) a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge; and (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas. In one variant of Marxism, senses (i) and (ii) can be effectively combined, as in a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes are either part or wholly false (illusory). This has led to intense controversy within Marxist thought.

Ideology was coined in the late eighteenth century by French philosopher Destutt, who believed that ideas were not to be and could not be understood in any of the older'metaphysical' or 'idealist' senses. He argued that the science of ideas must be a natural science, since all ideas originate in man's experience of the world. The initial bearings of the concept of ideology are complex, as it asserted against metaphysics that there are 'no ideas in the world but those of men'. However, as a branch of empirical science, 'ideology' was limited by its philosophical assumptions to a version of ideas as 'transformed sensations' and language as a'system of signs'.

The concept of ideology in Marxism and Literature was a significant development that aimed to address the practical exclusion of social relationships implied in the model of'man' and 'the world' and the displacement of necessary social relationships to a formal system, such as the laws of psychology or language as a system of signs. This opposition was made from generally reactionary positions, which sought to retain the sense of activity in its old metaphysical forms.

Marx and Engels took up and applied this condemnation of 'ideology' in their early writings, attacking their German contemporaries in The German Ideology (1846). They saw finding 'primary causes' in 'ideas' as the basic error and introduced 'the real ground of history' - the process of production and self-production - from which the origins and growth of different theoretical products could be traced.

However, there were obvious complications at this stage, as 'ideology' became a polemical nickname for kinds of thinking that neglected or ignored the material social process of which consciousness was always a part. The language used to describe this separation is simplistic and has been disastrous in its repetition, belonging to the naive dualism of mechanical materialism, which has repeated the idealist separation of ideas and material reality but reversed its priorities.

In Capital (1956), Marx and Engels emphasize the importance of imagination in shaping human labor, but their approach to abstract empiricism was criticized for embracing the cynicism of practical men and the abstract empiricism of a version of "natural science." They introduced the sense of material and social history as the real relationship between "man" and "nature," but also sought to abstract the persuasive "men in the flesh," who are also conscious men. This confusion is the source of the naive reduction of consciousness, imagination, art, and ideas to reflexes, echoes, pluralism, and unity in the concept of "ideology."

The text argues that when speculation ends in real life, there is real, sensible science that begins: the representation of the practical activity and the process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge takes its place. Philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. The use of 'consciousness' and 'philosophy' depends on the argument that separating consciousness and thought from the material social process is futile, making consciousness and thought into ideology. However, this can be taken in a different way, such as separating consciousness and thought from real knowledge and the practical process. This leads to simple reductionism, where consciousness and its products can be nothing but reflections of what has already occurred in the material social process.

Experience shows that this is a poor practical way of understanding 'consciousness and its products'. The real problem is that the separation and abstraction of 'consciousness's- and its products' as a reflective or semaphore process results in a separate level of 'consciousness and its products'. These processes are always, though in variable forms, parts of the "Iliaterr~r~r:Qrocess~•rtseii," whether as the necessity of 'lem-etiíiiliB.giiiiiiiiii' in the labor process or as the necessary conditions of associated labor, language, and practical ideas of relation-snfp;o~wniehls-;o ofi'en an(fs'igiiffkiintly orgotten, mtlie rear-processes, all of them physical and material, most of them manifestly so- which are masked and idealized as 'consciousness and its products' but which, when seen without illusions, are themselves necessarily social material activities.

The concept of'science' is difficult to understand, as it has a much broader meaning than English science has had since the early nineteenth century. The German Wissenschaft and the French science have a much broader meaning than English science has had since the early nineteenth century. The real, practical dissolution of these phrases, the removal of these terms from the discourse, is a crucial step towards a more comprehensive understanding of society.

Ideology is a process of thought that derives both its form and conterit from pure thought, either their own or that of their predecessors. It can appear virtually psychological, structurally similar to the Freudian concept of 'rationalization'. In this form, a version of 'ideology' is readily accepted in modern bourgeois thought, which has its own concepts of the'real'-material or psychological-to undercue either ideology or rationalization. However, it had once been a more serious position, identified as a consequence of the division of labor.

The division of labor manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists), while the other part's attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, as they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make illusions and ideas abaeus.

Ideology hovers between a system of beliefs characteristic of a certain class and a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge. This uncertainty was never really resolved, and ideology as a separate theory is itself separated from the (intrinsically limited) 'practical consciousness of a class'. This separation is easier to carry out in theory than in practice.

The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class, but this may or may not be true, as all the difficult questions arise about the development of a pre-revolutionary or potentially revolutionary class into a sustained revolutionary class. Marx and Engels's own complicated relations to the revolutionary character of the European proletariat and their complicated relationship to their intellectual predecessors demonstrate this difficulty.

The concept of 'ideology' has been a topic of debate within Marxism, with various interpretations and uses. One such interpretation is the abstraction of 'ideology' as a category of illusions and false consciousness, which would prevent examination of the material social process in which ideas become practical. This abstraction differs from Marx's emphasis on a necessary conflict of real interests, the material social process, and ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

Throughout the development of Marxism, there has been a dogmatic retention of ideology as 'false consciousness', which has often prevented the more specific analysis of operative distinctions of 'true' and 'false' consciousness at the practical level. Lenin's formulation sees 'ideology' as introduced on the foundation of all human knowledge, science, etc., brought to bear from a class point of view.

There is an obvious need for a general term to describe not only the products but also the processes of all signification, including the signification of values. 'Ideology' and 'ideological' have been widely used in this sense, with 'ideological' being taken as the dimension of social experience in which meanings and values are produced.

 

Jan Assmann, "Communicative and Cultural Memory" (Summary)

Memory serves as the foundation for both personal and collective identity, operating on three distinct levels. At its innermost level, memory functions within our neuro-mental system, constituting our personal memory. On the social level, memory becomes a matter of communication and interaction, as demonstrated by Maurice Halbwachs, who emphasized the social nature of memory. Meanwhile, psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung explored collective memory within the human psyche's unconscious depths.

 

Aby Warburg expanded the concept of memory to the cultural realm, introducing the term "social memory." He examined how cultural artifacts, particularly images, serve as carriers of memory. Warburg's "Mnemosyne" project explored the enduring influence of classical antiquity on Western culture. Similarly, Thomas Mann's novels delved into cultural memory, focusing on the Late Bronze Age in Palestine and Egypt while reflecting on European cultural heritage and its Jewish roots.

 

The distinction between "communicative memory" and "cultural memory" clarifies the relationship between memory and tradition. While Halbwachs focused on collective memory as shaped by social interactions, cultural memory extends beyond communication to encompass institutionalized forms of memory preservation and transmission. External symbols, such as monuments and museums, play a crucial role in shaping cultural memory, serving as reminders across generations.

 

Unlike cultural memory, communicative memory lacks institutional support and relies on everyday interactions and communication. It is sustained by familial and communal ties and tends to have a limited time depth, typically spanning three generations. The durability of communicative memory depends on the continuity of social bonds and frameworks of communication.

 

Halbwachs's later work highlighted the institutional and power dynamics involved in shaping collective memory. His examination of Christian memory in Palestine during the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity revealed the influence of theological dogma and the church's power structure on the construction of official memory.

 

Jan Vansina, an anthropologist renowned for his work with oral societies in Africa, identified a tripartite structure in the representation of the past within these societies. He observed that recent events, prominently featured in everyday communication, gradually recede into the background over time. Information about the recent past becomes scarcer and less precise as time passes. In contrast, the most distant past, including narratives about the world's origins and the tribe's early history, is extensively formalized and institutionalized, preserved through rituals, songs, and other cultural practices. This formalized aspect of memory, termed "cultural memory," involves specialized individuals and requires specific occasions for its activation.

 

Vansina's concept of the "floating gap" highlights the divide between the informal memory of recent events and the formalized cultural memory of the distant past. This gap shifts with each generation, influencing historical consciousness in oral societies, which typically operates on two levels: the time of origins and the recent past.

 

In oral history, the communicative memory pertains to memories of the recent past shared among contemporaries. This aligns with Halbwachs's notion of collective memory, focusing on memories passed down through oral tradition rather than written sources. Cultural memory, on the other hand, relies on fixed points in the past, represented through symbols and rituals that illuminate the present. In cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history blurs, emphasizing the subjective interpretation of the past rather than its objective reconstruction.

 

Memory, particularly cultural memory, is closely tied to identity, shaping individuals' sense of self within various social, cultural, and political contexts. Memory serves as a repository of identity, reflecting one's diachronic identity as an individual or member of a group. The dynamics of memory formation are influenced by affective ties and social obligations, driving individuals to remember in order to maintain a sense of belonging. Conversely, the transition from one group to another often involves forgetting the memories associated with the original identity, highlighting the complex interplay between memory and identity formation.

 

The distinction between communicative and cultural memory is also evident in the social dynamics of participation. In communicative memory, group participation is diffuse, with individuals acquiring knowledge through everyday interaction and socialization. There are no specialized custodians of informal memory; rather, knowledge is collectively shared among community members. Conversely, participation in cultural memory is highly differentiated, even within oral and egalitarian societies. Historically, the preservation of cultural memory was entrusted to specialized individuals such as poets or griots, who served as guardians of the group's cultural heritage.

 

These cultural memory specialists, found in both oral and literate societies, include a diverse array of figures such as shamans, bards, priests, and scholars. In oral traditions, the specialization of memory carriers depends on the demands placed on their memory, with some rituals requiring verbatim transmission and strict adherence to oral scripts. For instance, in ancient Rwanda, the memorization of ritual texts was a highly esteemed task, with specialists risking severe consequences for errors.

 

Rituals often gave rise to mnemonic techniques, such as knotting cords or other forms of pre-writing, to aid in memorization. Interestingly, attitudes toward writing varied among different religious traditions. While some, like the Indo-European traditions, distrusted writing due to fears of dissemination and loss of secrecy, others, such as ancient Near Eastern societies like Mesopotamia, embraced writing as a means of codifying and transmitting sacred knowledge.

 

Moreover, cultural memory participation is often structured by notions of secrecy and esotericism, leading to elitism within society. Certain areas of knowledge are restricted to select individuals, requiring initiation or specialized training for access. This inherent tendency toward elitism results in systematic exclusions, such as the exclusion of women in certain historical contexts or lower classes in societies dominated by an educated bourgeoisie.

 

Additionally, the media of cultural memory often exhibit a form of intra-cultural diglossia, reflecting the distinction between a "great tradition" and several "little traditions." Traditional societies commonly use different languages or linguistic varieties for formal versus everyday communication. However, modern societies introduce further linguistic varieties through cultural media like film and television, complicating this binary structure.

 

The dynamics of cultural memory are marked by transitions and transformations, which hold structural significance and merit brief discussion. One direction involves the transition from autobiographical and communicative memory to cultural memory. Another direction within cultural memory involves moving from the background to the foreground, from the periphery to the center, and from latency or potentiality to manifestation or actualization, and vice versa. These shifts entail crossing structural boundaries: the boundary between embodied and mediated forms of memory, and the boundary between what we term "working" and "reference memories," or "canon" and "archive."

 

Raymond Williams, 3. Literature (Marxism and Literature)

'literature' as a concept is relatively difficult to define, as it appears to be a specific description and highly valued. It is often defined as 'full, central, immediate human experience', with an associated reference to minute particulars. In contrast,'society' is often seen as essentially general and abstract, with the summaries and averages of human living being the direct substance. Other concepts such as politics, sociology, or ideology are often seen as mere haraened outer spheres of common living experience.

The concept of 'literature' can be shown in two ways: theoretically and historically. One popular version of the concept has been developed in ways that appear to protect it, and in practice do often protect it against any such arguments. An essential abstraction of the 'personal' and the 'immediate' is carried so far that, within this highly developed form of thought, the whole process of abstraction has been dissolved. Arguments from theory or history are simply evidence of the incurable abstraction and generality of those who are putting them forward. This is a powerful and often forbidding system of abstraction, in which the concept of 'literature' becomes actively ideological.

Theory can do something against it by acknowledging that whatever else 'it' may be, literature may be the process and the formal composition within the social and formal properties of a language. The effective suppression of this process and its circumstances, achieved by shifting the concept to an undifferentiated equivalence with 'immediate living experience', is an extraordinary ideological feat. The very process that is specific, that of actual composition, has effectively disappeared or has been displaced to an internal and self-proving procedure in which writing of this IQ.n is believed to be 'immediate living experience' itself.

The modern term 'literature' did not emerge earlier than the fifteenth century and was not fully developed until the nineteenth century. The word itself came into English use in the fifteenth century, following French and Latin precedents. Literature as a new category was a specialization of the arts formerly categorized as rhetoric and grammar, a specialist in the material on text of the development of science, especially the book. It was eventually a more general category of poetry or earlier poesy, which had been general terms for imaginative composition but became predominantly specialized in relation to the development of literature.

Literature has evolved over time, with a focus on social class and the development of a generalized social concept. In its first extended sense, literature was defined as "no" learning and thus constituted an articulate social distinction. New political concepts of the "nation" and new valuations of the "vernacular" interacted with a persistent emphasis on "literature" as reading in the "classical" languages.

In the eighteenth century, literature was primarily a generalized social concept, expressing a minority level of educational achievement. It was considered a potential and experientially valuable form of literature, including philosophy, history, essays, and poems. The question of whether new eighteenth-century novels were "literature" was first approached by reference to the standards of "polite" or "humane" learning.

The definition of literature has persisted, losing its earliest sense of reading ability and reading experience, and becoming an apparently objective category of printed works of a certain quality. The concerns of a "literary editor" or a "literary supplement" would still be defined in this way. However, three complicating tendencies can be distinguished: defining a "high literary quality," an increasing specialization of "oflint" or "imaginative" works, and a development of the concept of "tradition" within national terms, resulting in the more effective definition of "a national literature."

The shift from "learning" to "taste" or "sensibility" was the final stage of a "shift frorii a para-national scholarly profession," with its original social base in the church and universities, and with the classical languages as its share of culture. Criticismsm, a critical and bourgeois categorization, developed from commentaries on literature within the "learned" criterion to the conscious exercise of "taste," "sensibility," and "discrimination."

The reliance on "sensibility" as a special form of an attempted emphasis on whole responses to problems was a significant part of the general tendency in the concept of hteratu:(e)tow an emphasis on die use or (~Q!!~PiC.JJQl!~l.G$>:Q~MJB~Ji!£!,JJ;_,) of v.rorks eiilian on their production. While the habits of use or characteristics were standard criteria of a relatively integrated class, they had their characteristic strengths and weaknesses.

The concept of literature and criticism has evolved over time, with the specialization of literature to 'creative' or 'imaginative' works becoming more complex. This process was driven by a new social order, capitalism, which challenged the pressures and limits of the traditional social order. The central Romantic assertions depended on these concepts, which had a significantly absolute range, from politics and nature to work and art.

Literature acquired a new resonance but was not yet a specialized resonance. It developed several concepts together, such as 'art' being shifted from its sense of a general human skill to a special province defined by 'imagination' and'sensibility', and 'aesthetic' shifting from its sense of general perception to a specialized category of the 'artistic' and the 'beautiful'.

Taste and'sensibility' had begun as categories of a social condition, and a new specialization assigned comparable but more elevated qualities to 'the works themselves', the 'aesthetic objects'. However, there was still one substantial uncertainty: whether the elevated qualities were to be assigned to the 'imaginative' dimension (access to a truth 'higher' or 'deeper' than'scientific' or 'objective' or 'everyday' reality) or to the 'aesthetic' dimension (beauties' of language or style).

The category that appeared objective as 'all printed books' and given a social-class foundation as 'polite learning' and the domain of 'taste' and'sensibility', now became a necessarily selective and self-defining area. Not all 'fiction' was 'imaginative' or not all 'literature' was 'Literature'.

Criticism gained a quite new and effectively primary importance, as it was now the only way of validating this specialized and selective category. It was at once a discrimination of the authentic 'great' or'major' works, with a consequent grading of'minor' works and an effective exclusion of 'bad' or 'negligible' works, and a practical realization and communication of the'major' values.

This development depended on an elaboration of the concept of 'tradition'. The idea of a 'national literature' had been growing strongly since the Renaissance, drawing on all the positive forces of cultural nationalism and its real achievements. Each of these rich and strong achievements had been actual; the 'national literature' and the'major language' were now indeed 'there'.

Within the specialization of 'literature', each was re-defined so that it could be brought to identity with the selective and self-defining 'literary values'. The 'national literature' soon ceased to be a history and became a tradition, resulting in local disputes about who and what should be included or excluded in the definition of this 'tradition'.

The categorization of literature has been a significant challenge for Marxism, with the author arguing that it has made little headway against it. Marx himself did not attempt to challenge this categorization, as his intelligent and informed discussions of actual literature are often cited defensively as evidence of his humane flexibility in these matters. The radical challenge of the emphasis on 'practical consciousness' was never carried through to the categories of 'literature' and 'the aesthetic', and there was always hesitation about the practical application of propositions held to be central and decisive almost everywhere else.

When such application was eventually made, it was of three main kinds: an attempted assimilation of 'literature' to 'ideology', an effective and important inclusion of 'popular literature'-the 'literature of the people'-as a necessary but neglected part of the 'literary tradition', and a sustained but uneven attempt to relate 'literature' to the social and economic history within which 'it' had been produced. Each of these last two attempts has been significant, as they have extended or revalued the category of 'literature' but never radically questioned or opposed.

For half a century now, there have been other and more significant tendencies, such as Lukacs' profound revaluation of 'the aesthetic', the Frankfurt School's sustained re-examination of 'artistic production', Goldmann's radical revaluation of the 'creative subject', and Marxist variants of formalism undertook radical redefinition of the processes of writing, with new uses of the concepts of'signs' and 'texts' and a significantly related refusal of 'literature' as a category.

The crucial theoretical break is the recognition of 'literature' as a specializing social and historical category. This does not diminish its importance, as it is a key concept of a major phase of a culture and decisive evidence of a particular form of the social development of language. However, in our own century, there has been a profound transformation of these relationships, directly connected with changes in the basic means of production. These changes are most evident in the new technologies of language, which have moved practice beyond the relatively uniform and specializing technology of print.

The specialized concept of 'literature', developed in precise forms of correspondence with a particular social class, organization of learning, and the appropriate particular technology of print, should now be invoked in retrospective, nostalgic, or reactionary moods as a form of opposition to what is correctly seen as a new phase of civilization. What can then be seen as happening in each transition is a historical development of social language itself: finding new means, forms, and definitions of a changing practical consciousness. Many of the active values of 'literature' have then to be seen, not as tied to the concept, which came to limit and summarize them, but as elements of a continuing and changing practice moving beyond its old forms.