Causal Determination and the Problem of Meaning

Before turning to the task of extracting some common substantive themes from Eagleton, Jameson, and Bakhtin, some note

must be made of the essential theoretical logic that emerges in their work. In Eagleton and Jameson particularly, standard assumptions about causality and the social determination of culture come explicitly into question. Rather than being superstructural elements shaped in some temporal or mechanistically causal way by elements of the infrastructure, the elements at both levels stand in an articulated relation to one another as parts of a larger totality. This manner of speaking may appear to undermine traditional Marxist theory, converting it to a kind of bland Hegelianism, at the same time that it tries to preserve the language of conventional Marxism. The basic challenge, however, should be a critique of empirical positivism rather than an attack on Marxist theory. Even Jameson, who has been accused most strongly of turning Marx upside down, holds firmly to the assumption that the historical movement among capitalist modes of production, as posited in Marxist theory, constitutes the most fundamental starting point for any analysis of cultural production. The materialist infrastructure, however, is no longer conceived of as something merely evident in the empirical world and discoverable through the positive application of scientific methods. It is rather an analytic feature of reality that becomes a reality only in interaction with the application of Marxist theory itself. Only with the benefit of this theoretical framework does the totality of the base and superstructure components become evident. This perspective more nearly represents a post-positivist or hermeneutic understanding of the relations between evidence and interpretation. It in no way rules out the study of empirical relations to determine how they relate to the posited totality and, within this totality, to one another.

The point of examining relations between base and superstructure, therefore, ceases to be one of explanation, in the sense of finding the true causes of ideological expressions, or of reduction, in the sense of showing that these expressions are mere epiphenomena in the larger scheme of objective social structural relations. It is essentially a task of interpretation, a task accomplished by determining whether the various elements of base and superstructure relate to one another to form a single, dominant totality or whether there are internal contradictions and conflicts, or even openings, that provide room for creative, redemptive—dare we say, revolutionary—alternatives. For this purpose, the notion of articulation appears to provide a convenient summary term. It connotes mutual accommodation or adaptation, a fitting together, as it were, of the various puzzle pieces to form a coherent whole. Base and superstructure interact dynamically in this process on many levels. Ideology may not ultimately

transform the prevailing mode of production, but its internal structure shapes the degree of articulation that can develop with elements of the infrastructure, and it acts to control the resources and actions that its adherents can take. At the same time, pressures against articulation must be recognized. Base and superstructure are prevented from forming a wholly integrated system by the various contradictions, the alternative logics, that impinge upon them at any moment in historical development. Indeed, the very notion of totality must, since Althusser, be taken less as an integrated whole than as a conception that emerges from the complex, sedimentary or layered, interactions of what is present and what is absent.

If the fundamental point of studying ideology ceases to be one of causal explanation, then it can no longer be taken simply as a matter of interpreting the meaning of cultural symbols. Jameson, for instance, near the beginning of his discussion of literary texts, argues that a whole new approach to ideology must be found that goes beyond the quest for meaning. He cites a passage from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977), who assert a "general collapse of the question 'What does it mean?'" and argue that studies of linguistic structure have advanced only "to the extent that linguists and logicians have first eliminated meaning." Only in the broadest sense, that in which the interpreter provides an interpretation of base and superstructure by relating them to the theoretical framework provided by a Marxist (or some other) conception of history, can it be said that meaning has been ascribed to the cultural elements under scrutiny. Eagleton, Jameson, and Bakhtin emphasize the internal relations among the elements of texts and broader ideologies and the relations between these internal ones and those that constitute the social contexts in which the cultural products arise. The quest is for patterns of intelligibility rather than meaning.

These theorists do not go so far as to become what E. D. Hirsch (1976) has termed, referring to the deconstructionists, cognitive atheists , that is, interpreters who deny entirely the possibility of knowing what texts mean. Their view of meaning, however, focuses on relations rather than on some substratum of substantive truth. Jameson (1972:215), for example, specifically denies the simple semiotic method of discovering meaning by looking for the deeper "signified" that underlies the "signifier." Instead, he posits an "infinite regress from signifier to signified, from linguistic object to metalanguage." The shift is from meanings to sentences, from the content of substance to the content of relations. Rather than attempt to identify the meaning of a text, he writes about

"meaning-effect" and "meaning-process." He rejects the notion of prediscursive meaning and focuses instead on meaning as the possibility of transcoding from one level of structure to another (Mohanty 1982:35). Meaning from this perspective is thus deprived of any ontological status; it is approached through "a basic reformulation of substance into process and form, into structured movement and production" (Mohanty 1982:36).