Mike Gane - Ideological Representation and Power in Social Relations

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
SOCIAL THEORY

Volume 31

IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION
AND POWER IN SOCIAL RELATIONS

IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION
AND POWER IN SOCIAL RELATIONS

Literary and Social Theory

Edited by
MIKE GANE

First published in 1989

This edition first published in 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

1989 Mike Gane (in the editorial matter)

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-415-72731-0 (Set)
eISBN: 978-1-315-76997-4 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-138-78310-2 (Volume 31)
eISBN: 978-1-315-76359-0 (Volume 31)

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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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Edited by Mike Gane

Introduction
Mike Gane

Chapter 1
Skin deep: Barthes, Lavater and the legible body
Michael Shortland

Chapter 2
Textual theory: Derrida
Mike Gane

Chapter 5
Borges/Menard/Spinoza
Mike Gane

Chapter 6
A rose is a rose is Umberto Eco, the double agent
Pasi Falk

Chapter 7
After representation: recent discussions of the relation between language and literature
Ian Hunter

Chapter 8
Discourse and power
John Frow

It is hoped that the reader will find the present collection of essays, though written from a number of different perspectives, a stimulating introduction to some contemporary topics of literary analysis. In this brief presentation, I have no intention of trying to impose on them a false and unnecessarily formal sense of unity, but I do want to suggest that taken together they do reveal some important themes of modern social analysis, and illustrate the openness of the present situation.

Certainly one of the most significant themes is the fertile meeting of literary and social theory in the search for a better understanding of the functioning of ideologies. In the context of the general project of the journal Economy and Society, from which these essays have been gathered, the consideration of literary theory has been vital in the renewal of Marxist and Freudian theories of ideology and culture. Of course, for many Marxists, the choice once posed by the famous critic Georg Lukcs between either progressive realism (Thomas Mann) or depressive modernism (Franz Kafka) is still valid. If the reader judges Lukcs right to have set out the alternatives in this way, and to have settled the matter against modernism, this collection will be seen at best as irrelevant or nihilistic (Lukcs 1962: 4792). On the other hand, Michel Foucault remarked that modern literature was virtually a closed book for him while his principal intellectual nourishment was a diet of phenomenological and existential Marxism (1987: 174), implying that perhaps a realisation of the liberating power of modernist literature is itself dependent on certain ideological conditions. Lukcsian criticism, however, has been decisively displaced by the kind of writing and criticism represented here, and the crucial problems today concern not the struggle for or against modernism and postmodernism, but the struggle within it.

This collection well illustrates some principal current concerns, but without pretending that these discussions are exhaustive. Rather, these essays proceed by treating issues modestly; even the more prospective pieces are sketches and make no claim to be other than partial. The collection begins with highly critical assessments of aspects of work which has come to exercise a significant influence over recent literary theory: the work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, the first a leading exponent of literary structuralism, the second of post-structuralism (deconstruction theory). The first assessment, by Michael Shortland, concentrates on Barthes attempt to develop a modern characterology, a theory of corporeal representation related specifically to the so-called inscrutability of the Japanese; although Barthes does not in this area put into play a fully blown structuralist analysis Shortland argues that some of the great weaknesses of Barthes methods are starkly revealed. He compares Barthes ideas with those in works written in the eighteenth century by Lavater and brings to light some striking similarities. The result is, for Michael Shortland,

a dogmatic Utopia. The coloniser of the body surface lays down the rules, formulates the law of reading, and sets into play a pretence autonomy of signifiers. Text and image put into circulation body, face, writing, but only the last possesses any freedom of development (p. 45)