Page 242 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 231

related statements, objects and institutional sites that together compose the
‘episteme’ or field of practical knowledge at a particular moment. His analysis of
the relations and rules of transformation of discursive practices is suggestive, but
its effect, in spite of some throw-aways about ‘non-discursive practices’, is to
imply that such formations are virtually independent of the production process,
of class struggle, of politics. Prisons, hospitals, universities emerge as structures
of statements. Power appears as a function not of classes, nor of the state, but of
discourse itself.
Raymond Williams has recently commented on these theoretical difficulties in
18
a highly interesting, if too general, way. Of institutions he notes that
it is an underestimate of the process to suppose that it depends on
institutions alone…it is never only a question of formally identifiable
institutions. It is also a question of formations…which may have a variable
and often oblique relation to formal institutions.

But, conversely, many of those in real contact with such formations and their
work retreat to an indifferent emphasis on the complexity of cultural activity.
Others altogether deny (even theoretically) the relation of such formations and
such work to the social process and especially the material social process.
Williams has arrived at these concepts and these criticisms by his own, often
lonely, route. For a while his work was partly eclipsed by the prestige of more
‘rigorously’ theoretical accounts. As that prestige wanes or is qualified by a
sense of sharpening political urgencies, his work looks more and more
compelling: not least for its persistent emphasis on literature and culture not as a
‘structure’ (whether institution or formation) but as a productive practice and a
political struggle.

Reading
If we can agree, with Macherey, that literary criticism is not ‘an art, completely
determined by the pre-existence of a domain, the literary work, and finally
reunited with them in the discovery of their truth, and, as such…has no
autonomous existence’, but is rather the ‘study of the conditions and possibilities
19
of an activity activity’, then the starting-point for a literary theory of reading
must be to find ways of adequately conceptualizing the conditions and
possibilities of this activity. Marx’s insistence that ‘a product becomes a real
20
product only by being consumed’ may seem to offer a methodological starting-
point for such a theory. Yet, while sometimes paying lip-service to this and
similar formulations, theories of literary production have evinced no comparable
body of work on the consumption, reception or just plain reading of texts. As
Dubois has noted, ‘the tradition [of Marxist aesthetics] has a tendency to
21
consider the reader as a neutral pole, a “man [sic] without qualities”’. Thus the
recipient of the text too frequently remains, as in much bourgeois criticism, a