Theory Survey I/II: Literary

and Cultural Theory

7. Marxism

Prof. Dr. Philipp Schweighauser

Overall Structure of the Lecture Series

II. POLITICAL APPROACHES

week 7: Marxism (Karl Marx, Louis Althusser)
week 8: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
(Louis A. Montrose, Stephen Greenblatt,
Raymond Williams)
week 9: Post-colonial Theory (Gayatri Spivak,
Edward Said, Homi Bhaba)
week 10: Early Feminism (Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar, Elaine Showalter)
week 11: Gender Studies (Judith Butler)
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Karl Marx (1818-1883) Friedrich Engels (1820-1895)

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 Structure of this Lecture

1. Central Concepts of Marxism

2. Georg Lukács’s Reflection Model
3. Louis Althusser on Ideology
4. The Frankfurt School / Critical Theory: Theodor
W. Adorno
5. Utopia

1. Central Concepts
a. Base & Superstructure
• base (Unterbau) – superstructure (Überbau)
• ‘Vulgar Marxists’ believe
that the base completely
determines the
superstructure
• Marx and Engels ≠ ‘vulgar
Marxists’: “It is well
known that some golden
ages of art are quite
disproportionate to the
general development of
society, hence also to the
adapted from: http://www.hewett.
material foundation of art.”
norfolk.sch.uk/ (Karl Marx, Grundrisse)
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1. Central Concepts
b. Class & Dialectics
• class
• two social classes
• the bourgeoisie owns the means of production
• the working class supplies human labor and is exploited

history as class conflict: bourgeoisie vs. working class
• source of conflict: surplus value & profit

class consciousness
• dialectics
• DEF ‘dialectics’ = a method of social analysis that considers
contradictions as the motor of social development
• Hegel: thesis
antithesis
synthesis
• scientific result A
scientific result B
revision
of A (or B)
• Marx: bourgeoisie
working class
classless society
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 1. Central Concepts
c. Materialism
• materialism (Marx’s focus on the forces and relations of
production) vs. idealism (Hegel’s notion of the ‘World Spirit’)
“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian,
but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the
human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the
name of 'the Idea,' he even transforms into an independent
subject, is the demiurgos [deity] of the real world, and the real
world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea.'
With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the
material world reflected by the human mind, and translated
into forms of thought.” (Karl Marx, Capital)
• “putting Hegel back on his feet”
• history as a series of struggles over the material basis of
human existence
• a materialist analysis of literature considers it in its social and
economic contexts

2. Georg Lukács’s Reflection Model

• In Studies in European Realism and elsewhere, Georg Lukács
…
• argues that the forms of literature mirror the forms of
society (which is dialectical, i.e., structured by
contradictions)
• e.g. Theodore Dreiser‘s Sister Carrie: Dreiser‘s
juxtaposition of Sister Carrie‘s rising and Hurstwood‘s
declining fortunes mirrors/reflects social conflicts and
contradictions as well as the continual fear of social
decline under capitalism
• defends and privileges early 19th c. bourgeois realism (Sir
Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy), which he
takes to mirror the forms of society—and esp. its
contradictions, i.e., its dialectical nature—most accurately
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Lukács vs. Modernist Art

• In Studies in European Realism and elsewhere, Georg Lukács
…
• attacks modernism:
“As a literary form of expression of developed
imperialism, expressionism stands on an irrational and
mythological foundation; its creative method leads in
the direction of the emotive yet empty declamatory
manifesto, the proclamation of sham activism. It has
therefore a whole series of essential features that fascist
literary theory could accept without having to force
them into its mould.” (Georg Lukács, “Expressionism:
Its Significance and Decline”)

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 3. Louis Althusser on Ideology

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) 10

Two Orthodox (non-Althusserian) Marxist

Understandings of ‘Ideology’
• two orthodox Marxist definitions of ‘ideology’
• DEF1 ‘ideology’ = set of ideas that arise from a specific
social class (Marx)
• DEF2 ‘ideology’ = false consciousness (Marx)
• literary works …
… either reproduce the dominant ideology, e.g. by
happy endings that falsely resolve social conflicts
e.g. William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes

… or challenge the dominant ideology, e.g. by

realistically portraying social inequality
e.g. Stephen Crane’s “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets”

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Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses

• Althusser reconceptualizes the relationship

between base and superstructure, arguing that …
• the superstructure has relative autonomy
• the superstructure is overdetermined
• the superstructure consists of …
• repressive state apparatuses: government,
police, the law, army
• ideological state apparatuses: family, mass
media, religion, education, art

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 Althusser’s Definition of ‘Ideology’
• Althusser’s DEF of ‘ideology’ = “the imaginary
relationship of individuals to their real conditions of
existence” (Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation”)
• Althusser vs. Marx’s definition of ‘ideology’ as false
consciousness:
• ideology is not merely an illusion or dream; it
shapes the way we really live our lives
ideology
is imaginary (distorted, false, illusory) in that it
prevents us from seeing the real state of things; and
it is real in that it makes us live our daily lives
according to our imaginary relationship to the world
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Interpellation
• “Ideology interpellates individuals as Subjects”
(Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation”)
• two understandings of ‘subject’
• self-determined, autonomous individual
(cf. the subject of a sentence)
• subjected beings (cf. ‘the Queen’s
subjects’)
• interpellation = call = hailing = a systematic
form of address by which ideology invites
people to adopt specific subject positions
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How Interpellation Works I: Direct Address

• ideology can address

us directly
• e.g. Uncle Sam
recruitment poster
• Althusser‘s
example: police
officer shouting
“Hey you!”

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 How Interpellation Works II: Indirect Address
• ideology can address
us indirectly
•ideology constructs
subject positions
(ideal/implied
reader) for us and
encourages us to
adopt those
positions
•interpellation = the
process by which
ideology constructs
subject positions
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Pair Work: Althusser & John Fuller‘s

“Valentine”
• How does this poem interpellate us? In other
words,
• Q1: Who is the ideal/implied reader of this
poem?
• Q2: What assumptions about women and men
do we have to take for granted in order to find
this poem humorous and romantic?

cf. Sara Mills‘s reading of the poem (“Knowing Your

Place: A Marxist Feminist Stylistic Analysis”)

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4. The Frankfurt School / Critical Theory:

Theodor W. Adorno
• critical theorists: Theodor W.
Adorno, Max Horkheimer,
Herbert Marcuse, Ernst
Bloch, Leo Löwenthal, and
others
• Theodor W. Adorno‘s
Aesthetic Theory …
• considers literature to be
at a remove from ideology
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) • privileges modernism
• champions negativity as a
communicative
refusal/barrier that
forestalls the unthinking
consumption of art
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 Negativity as Communicative Refusal
“[Adorno writes in the social and historical context] of
an ever-expanding, monolithic capitalist society,
moving toward a system of total exchange as well as
total rationality, which is equivalent to absolute
reification in matters of social interaction. It is a system
in which the very notion of meaning has become wholly
contaminated with the capitalist ideology of total
exchange. In the face of this human debasement, art's
basic mode of resistance is in a sense that of opting out
of the system's communicative network in order to
attack it head on from the outside.” (Astradur
Eysteinsson. The Concept of Modernism)

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5. Utopia
• etymology of ‘utopia’: οὐτόποσ / εὐτόποσ = ‘no place’ /
‘good place’
utopia = a better world that does not exist (yet)
• primary function of utopia = critique of the status quo
• utopia as a literary genre:
• Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)
• John Winthrop‘s ‘city upon a hill’ (1630)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915)
• utopia today
• denunciation of utopias as totalitarian (Soviet Union)
• resurgence of utopianism (e.g. attac: “Another world is
possible)

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Utopian Marxist I: Herbert Marcuse

• Marxist utopian thinkers
• Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Claude-Henri Comte de Saint-
Simon: utopian socialism (critiqued by Marx and Engels as
drawing “castles in the air” [The Communist Manifesto])
• Ernst Bloch, The Pinciple of Hope
• Herbert Marcuse on the need for utopian thinking
“if critical theory, which remains indebted to Marx, does
not wish to stop at merely improving the existing state of
affairs, it must accommodate within itself the extreme
possibilities for freedom […], the scandal of qualitative
difference. Marxism must risk defining freedom in such a
way that people become conscious of and recognize it as
something that is nowhere already in existence.” (Herbert
Marcuse, “The End of Utopia”)

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 Utopian Marxist II: Fredric Jameson
• utopia‘s “deepest vocation,” = “over and over again
to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to
imagine the future, to body forth [...] the atrophy in
our time of what Marcuse has called the utopian
imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical
difference” (Fredric Jameson, “Progress vs. Utopia ;
or, Can We Imagine the Future?”)
• the function of utopia = “to reveal the ideological
closure of the system in which we are somehow
trapped and confined” (Fredric Jameson, “The
Politics of Utopia”)

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