Literary Theory 2019

literature only plays a secondary role as it cannot change the base, it can only have a mimetic function (is a passive recording) and it cannot transgress

but: good literature shows how things actually are

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

-> Sein bestimmt Bewusstsein

1. All forms to consciousness – religious, moral, philosophical, legal, as well as language itself – have no independent history but are immediately related to the material activity of men. 
   Material production is regarded as the ultimate determining factor of social existence, and class struggle is viewed as the central dynamic of historical development.
    
2.  the view that the class which is the ruling material force is also the ruling intellectual force: it owns the means of production both materially and mentally.

As part of the superstructure, the role of literature and art in shaping consciousness is limited.

-> But: Literature is exposing the reality of class struggles

• Freud’s partitioned subject: incapable of complete self-knowledge
• 3 areas: memory– unconscious– preconscious
  (early Freud)
• The conscious: a mere adjunct to the preconscious
• Driving force: experience of want -> pleasure principle
• Pleasure / relaxation vs. outlet / cultural work

• ‘dream-work’: the unconscious seeks gratification despite the censorship of culture 
  -> mechanisms of displacement and condensation
• Literary texts allowing Freud to develop and illustrate his theories (“Der Sandmann”, Oedipus Rex)
• Condensation and displacement as poetic principles -> see de Saussure & Jakobson

• Obsession with truth: power and selfhood vs. HORROR of the abyss
• Man – rather than God – as “great architect”

• The three metaphors: mental image, sound, generalization
• “legislation of language” -> artificial edifice
• literature major role as art admits that it uses metaphors, and we can only come close to the truth through the metaphoric language 

Vital. 

Two kinds of Art: The Apollonian and the Dionysian principle stand for two contrastive tendencies in art and culture.

Stands for control

Stands for self-abandonment / self-loss and the acknowledged break-down of cognition, which provokes both horror and ecstasy

• Bacon: “What is truth?” (Pilate) -> attraction of lies
• Bacon was an early champion of science
• Carnal knowledge
• Truth is not unified, he compares it to making coins (mixing impure metals): usefulness (you get coins), but also baseness and impurity (for mixing of metals)
• Guilty attraction
• Metaphors 

Dante: says his Divine Comedy is marked by polysemy, allegory and myth

ID: consists of uncoordinated instinctual trends, contains all our repressed desires, predates the development of ego and superego.

EGO: associated with reason and commonsense; mediates

SUPEREGO: the policeman in the system; plays the critical and moralizing role; ideal ‘I’ (Übervater).

an ideal (fictional) state of pleasure & fulfillment (union with the mother) is disturbed by the entry of the father

• dyad (Paar) to triangle
• recognition of sexual difference
• The mother’s difference is interpreted as lack.
• The male child fears castration and accepts separation from mother
• female child acknowledges castration and desires the father as owner of penis.
• the beginning of morality, conscience, authority associated with the father -> formation of superego as the ideal self
• male subject is encouraged to replace the mother with another woman -> No radical interruption of his erotic life 
• The female subject must change the sex of her love-object to make room for men in her life -> Radical break
• The male child is threatened with castration. Castration is avoided by accepting patriarchal rule.
• The female child acknowledges her own castrated (deficient) self.

This interpretation of sexual difference depends on accepting the privileged status afforded men and the de-privileged status afforded women as a given 

Freudian psychoanalyst. Develops Freud’s theories through Saussurian linguistics & Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology

Main claims:

(1) The unconscious is structured like a language.

(2) The human psyche is structured in three main orders: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.

(3) Subjectivity is based on a sense of lack (desire) that is never fulfilled.

At birth the subject is lacking: a fragment of a primordial whole (cultural fiction). For a time after birth, the child does not differentiate between itself and the mother. 

For Lacan, it is only when the child accedes to castration and the Law of the father, that s/he becomes fully competent as a language-speaker within his/her given social collective.

The baby as “homelette”: it spreads out gradually and starts experiencing otherness through separation (little losses/lacks).

The mirror stage (Imaginary): self-recognition, self-idealization, separation and self-estrangement

• Approaching identity from outside àsees the ‘I’ as another
• the Self is also a fictional construct and a misperception with defining characteristics the child does not experience (e.g., coordination, wholeness).
• The ego as narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify. 

• Associated with language acquisition
• Mother = 1^strepresentative of the Symbolic order, Father = 2^nd(surpassing her)
• Father signifies law & social regulation
• Language as a system of differences excluding the possibility of presence, generating desire 
• language as desire excludes fulfillment
• Father (objet grand A / Autre) as ideal self suggests the subject’s deficiency

Phallus = Transcendental Signifier (symbol) guaranteeing order and stability of the system

• not the ‘real’ world outside (which is more closely associated with the Symbolic), but that which cannot be conceptualized by the others
• The real marks the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language
• resists possession (also conceptually)
• constitutes trauma: disconnection or unsuccessful sublimation of drives (Freudian ID)
• does not arouse pleasure

Two methods active in dream-work:

1. Condension (Verdichtung): Several dream-thoughts, images or events that are similar are condensed (or combined / compressed) into one image. A single figure can be turned into a collective image, combining often contradictory elements.
-> Metaphoric principle (Saussure/Jakobson)

2. Displacement (Verschiebung): Something that is of little significance in the latent dream-thoughts is moved to the center of the manifest dream-content (and vice versa)
-> The emotion associated with one idea or experience is detached from it and attached to another one.
-> Metonymic principle (Saussure/Jakobson)

- Dreams distort the repressed to avoid the ego’s censorship.

- The distortion needs to be neutralized through analysis.

- positivist attitude to interpretation: Dreams written in ‘code’  -> uncovering true significance by ‘translating’ them.

• radicalizes the Saussurean principles of arbitrariness and difference: Language entails practices of metonymical and metaphorical displacement in a much more radical way than Freud believed.
• The unconscious is composed less of signs– stable meanings – than of signifiers with multiple, contradictory meanings.
• The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed.
• This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier': 
  slippage of the signified (unconscious, the original desire) under what can be known and talked about (the symbolic order, the chain of signifiers, what we can talk about, the replacement for the original desire) defies knowledge about my unconscious, therefore defies the unity of both in a unified, whole I.
• Access to the Real is practically impossible.

• the Real : the Symbolic ≈ Signified : Signifier.
• The bar separating S/s becomes insurmountable and it is thus impossible to represent the self adequately. 
• Signifier and signified as “distinct orders”, with the signifier merely in transfer
• While Lacan, too, sees a mechanism of metaphor and metonymy at work in dreams, he is much more skeptical than Freud about the possibility of making dreams positively meaningful.
• The impossibility of re-presenting the self adequately: lost in metonymic and metaphoric slippage.
• Lacan rewrites Descartes “I think, therefore I am” as “I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.”
• Important: The signifiers liberation from any obligation to represent the world of real objects.

• In critical theory and deconstruction, phallogocentrism is a neologism coined by Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning in Western culture designating the privileging of masculinity in speech, writing, and thought

• deconstruction of Western philosophy from a female point of view, constructing something new
• Questions the supposedly neutral position of the (male) observer and analyst 
  -> Subjective position!
• Advocates rethinking of the whole idea of what it means to be human: The binary logic (defining it against the other instead of by itself) and the notion of prototype (an idea, not reality) have been an obstacle to this question. How we interpret difference is subject to change.
• Not essentialist: Differences are not set in stone
• Experiencing difference allows us to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

• Critique of Descartes’s cogito: Descartes defines the human by erasing that which makes us human: having a body and relationships with others.
• Human beings do not exist in isolation, but as embodied subjects in relation to other subjects.
• Critique of the single unified male subject of Western philosophy.
• Lacans/Freuds neutrality isn’t really neutral.
• Our awareness of the body is mediated by language and relationships. Conversely, language and relationships and philosophy are equally mediated by the body.
• Gender as the relationship between nature and culture.

• She names mimicry as a possible way for women to subvert the current systematicity. 
• Irigaray argues that parody is a repetition with a difference and helps to prevent the uncritical reiteration of the system. 
• The goal should be a new system instead of ‘simple’ equality in the already existing order. 

• Irigaray analyses the system of kinship, of giving the women of a mans family away to men of another social group (Lévi-Strauss)
• She applies the Marxist concepts of capital and commodity to it. 
• The incest taboo as the centre of cultural organization leads to female exogamy (they are given away) and male endogamy (they stay, give away and maintain). 
• Men play out “hom(m)osexuality” (kinship system) through the bodies of women. The use value of the female body (her means of reproduction) are turned into exchange value (socially determined) and women become a currency (all the same). 
• Thus, women are exchangeable goods that ensure the persistence of the patrilinear line. 

• Genesis of the phallogocentric economy: a result of the exchange of woman, which in turn is a precondition for the market economy to work in the first place.

The way out of phallogocentrism lies in acknowledging the bisexual element. ‘Bisexual’ here is not about being attracted to both sexes, it’s about the presence of each in both.

• Claims a bisexual foundation in both sexes. Repressed homosexuality of the male, in which females are turned into a commodity within male relationships.
• The world is revolving “between men” and is based on trafficking of women.
• Repressing women is a way of repressing the homosexual, because the homosexual would involve a feminine side 

1. (Asexual) bisexuality seeing sexuality as a consequence of a sense of lack created by a division from original wholeness (Ur-myth)
2. True bisexuality is erotic, it is inherent in both man and woman being condition of all invention

-> in a certain way woman is bisexual – man having been trained to aim for glorious phallic monosexuality.

• (in theory) not feminine writing but writing that reflects the basic bisexuality of all humanity.
• antithesis of masculine writing / women’s means of escape
• Challenges women to write themselves out of the world men constructed for women. Put themselves into words (Rosemarie Tong) 
• Problem: Confirms the old dichotomies and an essentialist view of sexuality 

-> paradox: trying to overcome essentialism confirms it. 

shared a sense of identity “constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging” & of thinking and speaking from the margins of France while having been cultured by it

How does the world ‘appear’ to human beings (‘phenomena’ = that which appears) and how do we situate ourselves in a world of appearances?