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7. Marxism
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Structure of this Lecture
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
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3. Louis Althusser on Ideology
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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 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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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 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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