Page 237 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

226 ENGLISH STUDIES

a ‘theory of literary practice’ as distinct from their discussion of ideology, have
given a most rigorous and fruitful definition of the term practice which could be
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developed into a ‘regional theory’ for art and literature. In Althusser the two
sides—base/superstructure and practice-production—come together in a useful
way. Althusser accepts the value of the base/superstructure distinction. He also
accepts Engels’s notion that in capitalism the economic level is ‘determining in
the last instance’. But since he sees any complex social formation as a base/
superstructure complex, he argues that it is never actually possible to find one
level (the economic, say) appearing on its own without the other levels (social
relations, political practice, ideology, theory). Thus instead of a simple
determination, he speaks of relations of ‘contradiction and over-determination’
defining how any one level relates to another ‘within a structured whole’. 12
Althusser therefore does not believe that there are simple correspondences or
homologies between the different levels (the Hegelian problematic): each level is
produced by its own kind of practice, or ‘production’, and may stand in an
‘uneven relation to other practices’. Thus we are required by him to think what is
specific to, ‘relatively autonomous about’, each level, as well as the relations of
similarity and difference which govern social formation. The notion of practice
is useful here in clarifying what might be meant by speaking of literature as a
form of production.
Althusser has proposed that by practice we should mean ‘any process of
transformation of a determinate raw material into a determinate product, a
transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means
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(of ‘production’)’. The overall perspective of this view of art as a production,
of literature as a ‘practice’ is that the determination of art within society appears
not (as with Lukacs and Goldmann) at the level of general relations between the
structures of being and consciousness (the way Marx formulated the problem in
The German Ideology); but rather at the level of the specific character of the
moment, materials and activity of artistic production. Such a perspective
recognizes art as an activity within a determinate social world—but, more
significantly, as always in certain specific relations to other ‘practices’ at work
within the same historical moment. Art is seen as a practice which employs
certain specific ‘means’ to transform some set of objects or concepts or
perceptions into something else—the specific structure of the literary text or the
work as a symbolic-social object. However, what it is that literary practice
transforms, what distinguishes its means, materials and ‘mode’ of production,
what and how this practice is ‘determined by’ or ‘relatively autonomous from’
other practices, and so on, are problems in this approach which have not, so far,
been rigorously exposed.