The concept of 'typicality' has been significant in nineteenth-century thought, with two general forms: the 'ideal' type, which is typically associated with heroes in literature and is a rendering of 'universals', which are permanently important elements of human nature and the human condition. This can be seen as distinct from religious, metaphysical, or idealist forms of thought, but can also be argued that permanent elements of the human social situation, always modified by specific historical situations, are 'typical' or 'universal' in a more secular sense.
A different emphasis on 'typicality' was made by Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov, which became influential in Marxism. The 'typical' is the fully 'characteristic' or fully'representative' character or situation, which concentrates and intensifies a much more general reality. This redefined the notion of'reflection' to reflect the essential or underlying or general reality as an intrinsic process rather than as a separated process in time.
The Marxist theory of art insisted that'social reality' is a dynamic process, and that it is this movement that is reflected by 'typification'. Art, by figurative means, typifies the elements and tendencies of reality that recur according to regular laws, although changing with the changing circumstances. This description of social reality as a dynamic process is a major advance, but there is a danger of reducing this theory to art as the typification (representation, illustration) not of the dynamic process but of its ('known') laws.
In metaphysical and idealist thought, a comparable theory had included recognition of the essential and indication of its desirable or inevitability according to the basic laws of reality. In Marxist theory, the concept of 'ideal type' took on connotations of the 'future man'. However, the concept of 'typicality' is confusing due to its variety.
The sense of 'typicality' most consistent with Marxism is that based on recognition of a constitutive and constituting process of social and historical reality, which is specifically expressed in some particular 'type'. This related movement, of recognition and means of specific expression, is one of the most commonerious senses of'mediation', despite its basic disadvantages. However, 'type' can still be understood in two radically different ways: as an emblematic example of a significant classification, or as the represenative example of a significant classification. This presupposition repeats the basic dualism of all theories centred on the concept of'reflection' or'mediation'.
In the later work of the Frankfurt School, other concepts were developed, including the strict notion of 'correspondences' and the radically new concept of 'homology'. Walter Benjamin used the term from Baudelaire to describe an experience which seeks to establish its own crisis-proof form within the realm of the ritual. His presence and authenticity can be recognized by what he called its 'aura', which can be held at a simple subjectivist level, or it can be moved towards the familiar abstractions of myth, collective unconscious, or creative imagination.
The Frankfurt School was developing the idea of 'dialectical images' as crystallizations of the historical process. This concept is very near one sense of 'fyp~'J gi~.in_gJl' new social and historical sense of 'emblenuitic' or'symbolic' art.
The idea of 'dialectical images' needs definition. Adorno complained that they were often in effect'reflections of social reality', reduced to'simple facticity'. He argued that 'dialectical images' are models not of social products but rather objective constellations in which the social condition represents itself. This argument depends on a distinction between 'the real social process' and the various fixed forms, in 'ideology' or'social products', which merely appear to represent or express it. The real social process is always mediated, and one of the positive forms of such mediation is the genuine 'dialectical image'.
There is still a problem in the description of all inherent and constitutive consciousness as'mediated', even when this mediation is recognized as itself inherent. Yet in other respects, this is a crucial step towards the recognition of art as a primary process.
Theoretically, correspondences are resemblances, in seemingly very different specific practices, which may be both direct and directly related expressions of and responses to a general social process. At another level, correspondences are neither resemblances nor analogies but displaced connections, as in Adorno's example of the negative relation between Viennese 'number games' and the backward state of Austrian material development, given its intellectual and technical capacities.
Homology is a concept that extends from a sense of correspondence in origin and development to a sense of corresponding forms or structures, which are the results of different kinds of analysis. It was developed in the life sciences and includes a radical distinction from 'analogy'. Homology is correspondence in origin and development, while analogy is in appearance and function. The related distinction between'structure' and 'function' is directly relevant, with a range from 'general homology' (the relation of an organ to a general type) through'serial homology' (related orders of connection) to'special homology' (the correspondence of a part of one organism to another part of another organism).
The radical distinction between variants of 'correspondence' and 'homology' in cultural analysis must be related to the fundamental theoretical distinctions that have already been examined. Both 'correspondence' and 'homology' can be modes of exploration and analysis of a social process, which is grasped from the beginning as a complex of specific but related activities. Selection is evidently involved, but there is no a priori distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the'social' and the 'cultural', the 'base' and the'superstructure'.
Both 'correspondence' and 'homology' can be in effect restatements of the base-superstructure model and the 'determinist' sense of determination. Analysis begins from a known structure of society or a known movement of history, and specific analysis then discovers examples of this movement or structure in cultural works. Or, where 'correspondence' seems to indicate too simple an idea of reflection, analysis is directed towards instances of formal or structural homology between a social order, its ideology, and its cultural forms.
Theoretically, the'social order' has to be given an initially structured form, and the most available form is 'ideology' or 'world-view', which is already evidently but abstractly structured. This procedure is repeated in the cultural analysis itself, as the homological analysis is now not of 'content' but of 'form', and the cultural process is not its active practices but its formal products or objects. The 'fit' or homology between 'ideology' and 'cultural object' is often striking and important, but it comes with a heavy price: first, in the procedural selectivity of historical and cultural evidence; second, in the understanding of contemporary cultural process. An alternative approach to the same problems can be found in the developing concept of 'hegemony'.
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