discourse,power,ideology

6 Discourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism Linda Hutcheon Figurations, usually of an ideological origin whether acknowledged or no, will be found in history as well as in the history-like. (Frank Kermode) In the postmodern 'history-like' - be it in architecture, the visual arts, or literature - the ideological and the aesthetic are turning out to be 1 inseparable. The overt and self-implicating paradox of self-reflexivity ' meeting historical grounding in the postmodern fiction of, for example, Rushdie, Fowles, Eco or Doctorow resists any temptation to see ' ideology as that which only others fall prey to. What postmodern theory and practice have taught is less that 'truth' is illusory than that it is institutional, for we always act and use language in the context of politico-discursive conditions (Eagleton 1986: 168). Ideology both constructs and is constructed by the way in which we live our role in the social totality (Coward and Ellis 1977: 67), and by the way we represent that process in art. Its fate, however, is to appear as natural, ordinary, commonsensical. Our consciousness of ourselves is usually, therefore, uncriticized because it is familiar, obvious, transparent (Althusser 1969: 144). When these practical norms move from asserting how things are to claiming how they ought to be, we can begin to see the connections between ideology and existing relations of power. From the earlier Marxist notion of ideology as false consciousness or an illusory belief system, we have moved, in current critical discourse, to a different notion of ideology as a general process of production of meaning (Williams 1977: 55). In other words, all social practice (including art) exists by and in ideology (Coward and Ellis 1977: 72), and as such, ideology comes to mean 'the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in' (Eagleton 1983: 14). Much of the impetus to this redefining of ideology and to its newly important position in recent discussions of art has come from a reaction against the liberal humanist suppression of the historical, political, material and social in the definition of art as eternal and universal. Postmodern theory and practice have worked to contest this suppression, but in such a way that their implication in the underlying humanist value system cannot be ignored. 108 Discourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism one (see Belsey 1980; Waugh 1984), but the postmodern contesting of both is just as ideologically inspired, and considerably more ambiva- lent. The postmodern novel, in other words, does not (as Bakhtin claimed of the genre as a whole) begin 'by presuming a verbal and semantic decentring of the ideological world' (Bakhtin 1981: 367). It begins by creating and centring a world - Saleem Sinai's India (Midnight's Children) or Tom Crick's fen country (Waterland) - and then contest- ing it. Historiographic metafictions are not 'ideological novels' in Susan Suleiman's sense of the word: they do not 'seek, through the vehicle of fiction, to persuade their readers to the "correctness" of a particular way of interpreting the world' (Suleiman 1983: 1). Instead, they make their readers question their own (and by implication, others') interpre- tations. They are more 'romans a hypothhse' than 'romans a thbe ' . Art and ideology have a long history of mutual interaction - and recuperation - that undercuts the humanist and the more recent formalist separation of the two. Verdi's Israelite chorus, singing of its desire for a homeland (in Nabucco), was greeted by its first northern Italian audiences as singing their song, in an allegory of their desire to free themselves from Austro-Hungarian rule; it remains the unofficial national anthem of Italy today. In John Berger's postmodern novel, G., the revolutionary crowds gather in northern Italian cities around statues of Verdi, whose very name has come to stand for freedom (but only for some - it means oppression for others): V(ictor) E(mmanue1e) R(e) D ' I(ta1ia). Berger's text has its own overtly ideological focus which calls our attention to this changing, but real, history of art's implication in the political. In this novel, there is also a Livornese statue which plays an important allegorical role in the conjoining of the political and the aesthetic. It is a seventeenth-century representation of Ferdinand I , complete with naked and chained slaves adorning each of the four corners. These slaves, we are told, were modelled after local prisoners. This statue comes to be connected to the Risorgimento and then to the revolt of the new slaves - the workers -who have cast off their chains and come to life, in an ironic echoing (ironic because of the class inversion) of the Commendatore's statue in Mozart's Don Giovanni. But there are several levels of irony here. First of all, the 'slaves' who come to life are not just workers. Berger makes the connection between the ethnically oppressed of northern Italy - the Slavs (or sc'iavi) - and these slaves (or schiavi). The hero (known only by the initial G.) , though he may die for his political activities, is no resurrected Garibaldi, despite his nickname and his partly Italian blood. H e is, if anything, a Don Giovanni, so his death makes intertextual, if ironic, sense. Yet the historical Garibaldi's absent presence haunts the novel, from its early claim that its 'principal protagonist was conceived four years after Garibaldi's death' (Berger 1972: 20). This statement is followed by a long section on the Discourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism 109 importance of Garibaldi's particular blend of innocence and patriotism to Italian identity and politics. The novel's G . is neither innocent nor patriotic, however, so the link is again a deliberately ironic one. Postmodern fiction - like Brecht's drama - often tends to use its political commitment in conjunction with distancing irony like this and technical innovation, in order to both illustrate and incarnate its teachings. Cortazar's A Manual for Manuel becomes a didactic manual for the revolutionaries' son, Manuel, and the reader, both of whom 'come of age' in the reading of this text. The 'aura' of the original, genuine, single work of genius is replaced, as Benjamin foresaw, by the mechanical reproduction of fragments of history - here, of newspaper clippings embedded in the text we read. But what is gained is an ideological awareness both of the political, social, and linguistic repression in Latin America and also of the modes of possible resistance (see D'Haen 1983: 70-1). The social and historical contexts are made part of the physical text we read, thereby shifting, in Charles Russell's terms (about the work of those other postmodern writers. Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon), 'the previous social context of rebellion to the social text of ideology' (Russell 1985: 253). Criticism and interpretation, the arts of explanation and understanding, have a deep and complex relation with politics, the structures of power and social value that organize human life. (W. J. T. Mitchell) Just as metafictional self-consciousness is nothing new (think of Tristram Shandy, not to mention Don Quixote), so this merging of the ideological and the self-reflexively literary in a historical context is not radically innovative in itself: witness Shakespeare's history plays' self- consciously critical involvement of their audience in the questioning of social action and authority, past and present (Belsey 1980: 95-102), But the particular concentration of these concerns in the theory and practice of today suggests that, here, there may be something we could call part of a poetics of postmodernism. Of all current forms, it is postmodern fiction that, for me, best illustrates the paradoxes of this cultural enterprise. Its self-consciousness about its form prevents any occultation of the literary and linguistic, but its problematizing of historical knowledge and ideology works to foreground the implication of the narrative and the representational in our strategies of making meaning in our culture. One caution is in order, however. I am not saying that self- consciousness is, by definition, revolutionary or even progressive. Metafiction does not necessarily lead to cultural relevance (cf. Waugh 1984: 18) any more than self-demystifying theory is inherently radical (witness Newman 1985). It is perhaps liberal to believe that any subversion or undermining of a system of thought is healthy and good, 110 Dkcourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism but it would also be naive to ignore that art can just as easily confirm as trouble received codes, no matter how radical its surface transgres- sions. Texts could, conceivably, work to dismantle meaning and the unified humanist subject in the name of right-wing irrationalism, as easily as left-wing defamiliarizing critique: think of the works of Celine, Pound, and others. Nevertheless, it has become almost a truism of postmodern criticism today that the deconstruction effected by metafic- tional self-consciousness is indeed revolutionary 'in the deepest sense' (Scholes 1980: 212). But the art of postmodernism itself suggests a somewhat less sure sense of the inherently revolutionary value of self- reflexivity. The humanist faith in the power of language can be turned in on itself, for historiographic metafiction often teaches that language can have many uses - and abuses. h Language can also be presented as limited in its powers of represen- tation and expression. The self-conscious narrator of Berger's G. offers a verbal description of an event and then tells us: 'The description so far as it goes is accurate. But my power to select (both the facts and the words describing them) impregnates the text with a notion of choice which encourages the reader to infer a false range and type of choice . . . Descriptions distort' (Berger 1972: 80). The important things, we learn, are beyond words, 'like an undescribed natural event'. These things are intensely real, however; indeed, more real because they are not articulated or named (159). Yet, paradoxically, the narrating writer has only language to work with and knows he is unavoidably 'a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them' (137). Other historiographic metafictions - by writers as diverse as John Banville and Graham Swift - also frequently fore- ground the practical and theoretical consequences of that humanist faith in language, through their thematization and formal working-out of the ideological issues implicit in the novel genres representational and narrative identitv. One of the most extreme examples of metafictional self-theorizing about this and other humanist certainties is to be found in Ian Watson's novel, The Embedding, in which the linguistic theories of Chomsky, the anthropological structuralism of Levi-Strauss, and the political per- spective of Marx meet to explicate and theorize the narrative's enactment of their implications regarding human mental processes, cultural action, and social organization. All of these theories are shown to be human constructs which can be made to operate in the interests of political power, as well as disinterested knowledge (though the two are inseparable here): they are all - potentially - discourses of manipula- tion. The constant intertextual presence of the intensely self-reflexive work of Raymond Roussel suggests the further contamination of both ideology with art and art with scientific knowledge, past and future. The real power of both self-referring language and knowledge turns out to be their shared ability to distance us from that brute reality with which no one in the novel seems able to cope. For one of the characters, Dkcourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism 111 the moment of panic is this one: 'The world was about to be embedded in his mind in its totality as direct sensory apprehension, and not as something safely symbolized and distanced by words and abstract thought' (Watson 1973: 251). The subjective and the cosmic, the personal and the public cannot be separated in this novel; nor can the aesthetic and the political. Fiction like this is postmodern because in it language is inextricably bound to the social and the ideological (Kress and Hodge 1979: 15). Some kinds of contemporary criticism have been arguing on a theoretical level what postmodern fiction has meanwhile been busy illustrating as practice: that we need to examine critically the social and ideological implications operative in the institutions of our disciplines - historical, literary, philosophical, linguistic, and so on. The implica- tion is that all theory is political theory, whether it is aware of it or not. In Terry Eagleton's terms: Discourses, sign-systems and signifying practices of all kinds, from film and television to fiction and the languages of natural science, produce effects, shape forms of consciousness and unconsciousness, which are closely related to the maintenance or transformation of our existing systems of power. (Eagleton 1983: 210) For example, current literary theories, especially deconstruction, have been linked to both authoritarian politics (Graff 1979) and revolutionary pedagogy (Ulmer 1985). They have been blamed for the decline of the humanities and exalted as the salvation of the intellectual credibility of the academy. As many have pointed out, deconstruction is certainly compatible with conservative politics (Ruegg 1979) and with a liberal humanist preservation of the canon (Leitch 1980), but there has also been a move to make it into the companion or completion of the Marxist project (Ryan 1982; Spivak 1980). While its oppositional image has made it attractive to leftists, deconstruction (as it is practised in North America) has tended to be apolitical in its exclusive focus on textuality (see Holub 1984: 86-7). We would be wise to heed Edward Said's warning about equating the radical and oppositional in a literary context with the same in a political one (Said 1983: 158-77). It is perhaps telling, too, that deconstructive critics have, by and large, concentrated on canonical texts and avoided postmodern ones which contest, within their own very form, the same notions of unity, originality, coherence, subjectivity, and rationality as does the criticism. The self-consciously theoretical nature of historiographic metafictions like The Name of the Rose, The Book of Daniel, or Midnight's Children might to some extent pre-empt the deconstructive critic's demystifying: their contradictions, or aporias, are overt - and functional. I12 Discourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism Fabrication is surrounded by and in constant contact with the world: action and speech are surrounded by and in constant contact with the web of the acts and words of other men. (Hannah Arendt) What postmodernism's focus on its own context of enunciation has done is to foreground the way we talk and write within certain social, historical, and institutional (and thus, political and economic) frame- works. In other words, it has made us aware of 'discourse'. As Colin MacCabe has pointed out, the use of that word has become a kind of ideological flag in film (and other) criticism, signifying that the critic does not accept to analyse the formal articulation of a genre indepen- dently of its political and ideological address (MacCabe 1978-79: 41). As such, then, 'discourse' becomes an important and unavoidable term in discussions of postmodernism, of the art and theory that will not let us ignore social practices, the historical conditions of meaning, and the positions from which texts are both produced and received (see MacDonell 1986: 12). The diverse theoretical perspectives usually grouped together under the label of 'discourse analysis' share a mode of study which looks at authority and knowledge in their relation to power, and also at the consequences of the moment in history when 'truth moved over from the ritualized act . . . of enunciation to settle on what was enunciated itself: its meaning, its form, its object and its relation to what it referred to' (Foucault 1972: 218). This suppression of the enunciative act (and its responsibility) has led to the humanist separation of discourse from the exercise of power. Both postmodern art and theory work to reveal the complicity of discourse and power by re-emphasizing the enunciation: the act of saying is an inherently political act, at least when it is not seen only as a formal entity or in terms of what was said. In Foucault's words, this is a move to 'restore to discourse its character as an event' (Foucault 1972: 229), and thus to enable analysis of the controls and procedures by which discourse operates (216), both interpersonally and institutionally (Fowler 1981: 7). Art , theory, criticism are not really separable from the institutions (publishing houses, galleries, libraries, universities, etc.) which disseminate them and which make possible the very existence of a field of discourse and its specific discursive formations (the system of norms or rules that govern a certain way of thinking and writing at a certain time and place). So, when we speak of discourse, there is a concrete, material context involved. Discourse, then, is both an instrument and an effect of power. This paradox is why it is so important to postmodernism. What Doctorow's Daniel learns by writing The Book o f Daniel is that discourse is, in Foucault's terms, 'a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy' (Foucault 1980: 101). Discourse is not a stable, continuous entity that can be discussed like a fixed formal text; because it is the site of conjunction of power and Discourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism 113 knowledge, it will alter its form and significance depending on who is speaking, histher position of power, and the institutional context in which the speaker happens to be situated (Foucault 1980: 100). Historiographic metafiction is always careful to 'situate' itself in its discursive context, and then uses that situating to problematize the very notion of knowledge - historical, social, ideological. Its use of history is not a modernist look to the 'authorizing past' (Conroy 1985) for legitimation; it is a questioning of any such authority as the basis of knowledge - and power. The narrator of G. is not content to explain the fact that G.'s mother wanted to be with her child all the time, in terms of general (or 'universal') categories, such as motherly love. He con- textualizes it in its time and place and class, telling us that, in upper and middle-class Europe her desire 'would have been treated as hysterical. An infant, like everything else in the nineteenth century, had its own place - which was unshareable' (Berger 1972: 27). It was Michel Foucault who was most responsible for problematizing the relation of discourse to power. Power, he argued, is omnipresent, not because it embraces all human action, but because it is constantly beingproduced: 'it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power' (Foucault 1980: 93). Power is not a structure or an institution. It is a process, not a product. But postmodern thought inverts the power arrangements described by Foucault. He claims there is a doubled discourse: a disavowal and then reinscription of control or power. In postmod