Page 196 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

LANGUAGE 185

not foresee transformational methods? The facts of history show that no one
could. 16
The work of the Bakhtin group was precisely in these areas. By studying the
history of meaning systems, they began to break open the transcendental sense.
Through attention to the subjective that characterizes Vološinov’s book they
began to look at the form of the transcendental subject. For a Marxist paying
attention to the psychological the constitution of the subject is a vital question.
Human beings are composed of shapeless drives which are constructed into
sociality by a necessary (that is, it is the prerequisite of social organization)
repression (a shaping whose effect is one of blocking-and-returning-elsewhere
rather than a mere channelling, as Reich might put it). This means that social
structures, particularly as expressed in the family, enter into the very dynamic of
the construction of the individual. The individual is not seen as unified, an
expression of essence, but as crossed by contradictions (as in Althusser’s more
mechanistic formulation) and producing contradictions. The tasks of Marxism
are, then, to unite the subjective and objective factors to change the material
conditions of existence and afterwards, by a continuous criticism, to transform self
and society in the same movement. Philippe Sollers has summed up the
divergences between these two politics:

Whilst idealism, as Lenin saw, ‘develops’ the subjective and works on it to
the point of drowning in it…materialism completely ignores internal
causality. Here we see the intersection of a double misrecognition of the
dialectical process, whose result is the same refusal of the verifiable
workings of psychoanalysis and the politics of passivity. That thinking of
the subject that either sees it as diffracted everywhere or denies it does not
permit any link between external causality and internal causality, any
marking of the aspect of constant transformation, of plurality of
contradiction (antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, principal
and secondary aspects of contradictions, etc.). This situation enables the
perpetuation of that greatest of false debates between humanism and anti-
humanism, which is completely surpassed by both the Freudian perspective
and the historical conjuncture; it also provokes the perpetuation of a break
between the politics of the subject (to be posed in language) and that of the
masses. 17

Cultural Studies should occur at precisely the site of this break between the
individual and the masses; its task is to elaborate a theory which overcomes this
gaping chasm in our understanding. Failure to do this will leave the Left
powerless against Fascism, mouthing some variant of the conspiracy theory of
history or the coercive theory of ideology. Our choice is clear: either to be correct
dogmatically, or to be correct historically. We cannot do both.