Terry Eagleton

The most relevant aspects of Terry Eagleton's work for rethinking the Marxist sociology of culture are contained in his essays

"Categories for a Materialist Criticism" and "Towards a Science of the Text" (in Eagleton 1976). Eagleton's starting point is the work of Raymond Williams, which he argues is flawed by an overly abstract, subjectivist conception of culture that conflates it with its material base. As a remedy, Eagleton advances a more concrete conception of culture, one that relies on the more categorical way of thinking that Williams criticizes, but seeks to avoid oversimplifying the relation between base and superstructure by specifying several subdivisions of each. Culture—that which is to be explained—is conceived of not as some ephemeral orientation in society but as a specific material practice or object, namely, a text.

At the same time, Eagleton denies the possibility of relating a specific text directly to the social context in which it is produced. Intervening factors that must be considered include some of the more implicit beliefs and assumptions on which subjectivist approaches to culture have focused. Eagleton identifies six "major constituents" that must be related to one another: the general mode of production (GMP), the literary mode of production (LMP), general ideology (GI), authorial ideology (AuI), aesthetic ideology (AI), and text.

The first five of the constituents are the structures, Eagleton says, that produce the text. Their relations with one another and with the text do not, however, form a causal system (a recursive model of the kind sometimes imagined by statistical sociologists). Eagleton (1976:45) suggests instead that the task of criticism is to analyze "the complex historical articulations of these structures." The term articulation is, of course, reminiscent of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar (1970), although Eagleton makes no specific mention of them at this point.

For Althusser, the notion of articulation arises specifically in the context of discussing the relations among modes of production that are not entirely integrated with one another but that can be understood by the theorist as part of a single system. Their relations emerge not only in the historical evolution of capitalism itself but also in the theorist's efforts to reconstruct the internal mechanisms of capitalism. Rather than specific binary relations being most at issue, it is the larger system of interrelationships that Althusser claims determines the course of history. It is, of course, this notion of a broader system that distinguishes Althusser's approach from the more limited materialist interpretations of Marxism, and Eagleton follows Althusser in adopting this general perspective in dealing with culture.

More generally, the idea of articulation as a way of thinking about

relations among concepts also appears to underlie Eagleton's discussion. In this sense, articulation connotes dual, opposing tendencies, a fitting together of elements to form an interrelated system and yet a retention of distinct identities that prevent a system from becoming entirely integrated. As Maurice Bloch (1983:153) states, articulation refers to "a type of connection where what is joined does not consequently form a whole. The articulated elements remain fundamentally unchanged as if ready to detach themselves. The notion of articulation therefore stresses the idea of several elements whose different natures will lead to contradiction and therefore revolutionary change." Eagleton (1976:45) echoes this idea, although he places less emphasis on revolutionary change in suggesting that the primary relations of articulation that may occur among literary modes of production are "homology, conflict and contradiction." The idea of elements that remain unchanged, detachable, and contradictory is, as we shall see, evident in Bakhtin's discussion of the features of texts themselves, a theme that will prove helpful for understanding the specific nature of cultural criticism.

Eagleton passes quickly over the general mode of production, pausing only to assert that he considers it dominant, historically specific, and general only in the sense of referring to economic production broadly as opposed to literary production more narrowly. He thus assumes the Marxist position—that mode of production is the most salient feature of the social environment—as a starting point, rather than leaving this assumption open to historical investigation. In doing so, he of course leaves his discussion open to criticism on precisely these grounds. His analysis of the social environment in which cultural production takes place consists of asserting little more than that this environment is capitalist or bourgeois. Therefore, the value of his approach lies more in specifying the relations between cultural production and cultural products than in suggesting innovative conceptions of the relevant features of bourgeois society.

In his discussion of the concept of literary modes of production, Eagleton becomes more specific and of course more relevant to the immediate issue of cultural criticism. It emphasizes the fact, perhaps obvious yet often neglected in sociological theories of culture, that culture does not simply bear a kind of general affinity with its societal environment but is produced in specific contexts. It is to these contexts that closest attention must be paid to understand how social factors shape the form and content of culture. A literary mode of production, moreover, is not, in Eagleton's view, reducible to some mechanical or

technological determinant, such as the printing press and movable type. It is rather constituted by a set of social interactions among the occupants of concrete social roles: the relations among cultural critics, patrons, suppliers of materials, publishers, disseminators, opponents, and consumers. This is one of Eagleton's most useful observations, although it is by no means original to him. Whether one takes a Marxist approach to culture or some other approach, the point is the same: culture originates in specific social settings and is likely to bear the imprint of these settings.

In addition, Eagleton cites and distinguishes among some historical examples of the ways in which literary modes of production may differ.

The tribal bard professionally authorised to produce for his king or chieftain; the "amateur" medieval poet presenting to his patron a personally requested product for private remuneration; the peripatetic minstrel housed and fed by his peasant audience; the ecclesiastically or royally patronised producer, or the author who sells his product to an aristocratic patron for a dedication fee; the "independent" author who sells his commodity to a bookseller-publisher or to a capitalist publishing firm; the state-patronised producer (1976:47).

Clearly these correspond generally to the level of economic development (general mode of production), and they in turn limit the kinds of texts that are likely to be produced. Texts produced under ecclesiastical patronage are likely to be devoutly didactic, to take the most obvious cases, while novels produced for sale to a commercial audience of bourgeois consumers are more likely to cater to the private tastes of these consumers. Authors' conceptions of their audiences and the means of reaching these audiences will, Eagleton suggests, shape both the choice of genre and the actual content of the works produced.

Beyond the effects of the experienced social relations in which culture producers are engaged, texts are also shaped by the three varieties of ideology, which Eagleton identifies as general, authorial, and aesthetic. All three pertain to the specific social relations in which culture producers are embedded and differ primarily in terms of which social relations are at issue. General ideology is defined as "a relatively coherent set of 'discourses' of values, representations and beliefs which, realised in certain material apparatuses and related to the structures of material production, so reflect the experiential relations of individual subjects to their social conditions as to guarantee those misperceptions of the 'real' which contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations" (1976:54). Authorial ideology, Eagleton states, is "the effect of the author's specific

mode of biographical insertion into GI, a mode of insertion overdetermined by a series of distinct factors: social class, sex, nationality, religion, geographical region and so on." Aesthetic ideology, by comparison, is not defined formally but is described by typical examples of its content: "theories of literature, critical practices, literary traditions, genres , conventions, devices and discourses" (1976:60).

Each of these definitions, of course, raises a host of conceptual and theoretical questions that could become the focus of extensive discussion. Eagleton himself appears more interested in subsuming virtually everything that might shape the production of cultural texts under these rubrics than in delimiting the range of relevant considerations. Nevertheless, several important points can be extracted that may be useful in redirecting sociological thinking about cultural criticism and its relations to the social environment in which it is produced.

To begin with, Eagleton's conception of ideology differs radically from what might be considered in more standard sociological treatments of literary production to be the worldview, or even the internalized norms and values, of the literary producer. This point is worth underscoring because Eagleton does employ terms, such as beliefs, values, and misperceptions, and emphasizes what might be understood as the author's self-perception. All of this may seem reminiscent of a subjectivist conception of ideology. Nevertheless, Eagleton's emphasis is on a more objectivated form of ideology. In particular, he uses the phrase "discourses about values" rather than simply saying "values"; he asserts that these discourses are "realized in certain material apparatuses"; he discusses authorial ideology not as self-image but as literary expression, that is, as the way in which the author is represented within the text itself; and he again refers to concrete elements of discourse—conventions, genres, practices, and so on—in discussing aesthetic ideology.

Although ideology has an objective existence in the social world, it is analytically distinguishable from the social world, in Eagleton's view. Ideology is a discursive structure, a form of practice characterized by speech and the material artifacts of speech. It is discourse about the experienced world but not that world itself. The experienced world, perhaps ironically, is less observable for Eagleton than is the realm of discourse. Experience has a reality of its own, but it is observable only through the coordinates of the mode of production, on the one hand, and discourse, on the other hand. The mode of production, moreover, is a theoretical inference, an abstraction from the material conditions of the observed world. Thus the relation between base and superstructure

becomes for Eagleton, in effect, a relation between a theoretical construct concerning modes of production and the actual discursive structures observed in the texts produced within that context.

To state it this way, however, creates too sharp a distinction between infrastructure and superstructure. The social world is real, in Eagleton's outline, apart from discourse. But it is also incorporated into the realm of discourse. Or put differently, ideology does not simply reflect the social world; ideology draws the world of experience into itself, turning these experiences into categories that shape the production of specific texts. There is, in short, a social horizon built into the discursive structure of ideology. For Eagleton (1976:54), ideology is "strewn with the relics of imperialist, nationalist, regionalist and class combat." That is, political categories from the experienced world become discursive categories in ideology, both directly in the words that are used and indirectly in language and colloquial expressions. There are also "cultural" elements or, more precisely, antecedents drawn from the social environment about the ways in which knowledge is to be packaged and communicated, styles of discourse, genres, and literary standards. These are, to a certain degree, evident in the concrete texts of culture producers themselves.

The relation between ideology and infrastructure is, most importantly, mediated by the immediate social relations that Eagleton calls the literary mode of production . This is an apparatus that includes, he says,

the specific institutions of literary production and distribution (publishing houses, bookshops, libraries and salons), but it also encompasses a range of "secondary," supportive institutions whose function is more directly ideological, concerned with the definition and dissemination of literary "standards" and assumptions. Among these are literary academies, societies and book-clubs, associations of literary producers, distributors and consumers, censoring bodies, and literary journals and reviews (1976:56).

He also argues that the communications industry and educational apparatus play an important role.

Eagleton's point, however, is not to propose studies, such as those that have become common among both sociologists of culture and cultural historians, that focus primarily on the institutional aspects of printing, publishing, reading clubs, book fairs, literary academies, and the like. The point is rather to emphasize the form and content of the texts produced, to discover the categories that are emphasized and deemphasized, and to determine the ways in which these categories illuminate or obscure features of the world of social experience. For the last of

these especially, comparisons must be made between base and superstructure. Ideology, Eagleton assumes, will partially incorporate the experienced world into itself and will partially transform that world into something else. Ideology is not, therefore, simply a matter of false consciousness. As Eagleton (1976:69) explains, "Ideology is not just the bad dream of the infrastructure: in deformatively 'producing' the real, it nevertheless carries elements of reality within itself."

The elements of the real that are brought into the ideological realm are selectively processed through the institutional relations that comprise the literary mode of production. But again Eagleton stresses the interactive character of this process. He rejects a straightforward positivist view in which the real is seen as something external to ideology, a characteristic of the infrastructure that is merely reflected in ideology. The real is instead constituted by the discursive structure of ideology itself.

The real is by necessity empirically imperceptible, concealing itself in the phenomenal categories (commodity, wage-relation, exchange-value and so on) it offers spontaneously for inspection. Ideology, rather, so produces and constructs the real as to cast the shadow of its absence over the perception of its presence. It is not merely that certain aspects of the real are illuminated and others obscured; it is rather that the presence of the real is a presence constituted by its absences, and vice versa (1976:69).

Ultimately, then, the focus of analysis must be on the interplay of categories within the text itself. For it is here that the social world is reconstructed; here that reality is created—a reality that in some ways may correspond directly with the theorized character of the materialist infrastructure of history, but that also, by virtue of its textuality, escapes this direct form of determination, providing instead a defamiliarization of experience, "a sportive flight from history, a reversal and resistence of history, a momentarily liberated zone in which the exigencies of the real seem to evaporate, an enclave of freedom enclosed within the realm of necessity" (1976:72).