Page 244 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 233

which we consider acceptable, in accordance with the institution of
literature.
Historically, one of the reasons for shifting the emphasis from ‘text’ to ‘reading’
derives from the preoccupation with ‘polyvalence’ or ‘indeterminacy’ which has
undermined the view of literary criticism as the quest for the one irrefutable
meaning, the essential ‘truth’ of the text. In the work of Iser the notion of
interdeterminacy is actively appropriated and promoted to being a criterion of
what constitutes the ‘truly’ literary text. To Iser, it is the

virtual dimension of the text that endows it with its reality…expectations
are scarcely ever fulfilled in truly literary texts…we feel that any
confirmative effect …is a defect in a literary text. This virtual dimension is
not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming
together of text and imagination. 27

It is indicative of the anti-materialist tendency of such notions of ‘competence’
or ‘imagination’ that, for Culler, the road forward would be in the direction of
‘an aesthetics based on the pleasure of the reader’, while for Iser the direction is
towards individual self-discovery, ‘the chance to formulate the unformulated’.
It is perhaps in the work of Manfred Naumann and of other East German
‘reception theorists’ that a Marxist theory of reading may find a serviceable
basis. Naumann’s central notion of the text as ‘Rezeptionsvorgabe’, a
determining element in the process of reception (an idea that draws on the
Grundrisse concept of productive consumption), combined with the Brechtian
notion of the ‘active subject’, seems to provide a productive formulation which
retains the specificity of literary practice while at the same time seeing that
practice as inherently social, as a field of multiple determinations structured in
dominance. For Naumann the relation between the text and the reader ‘represents
only in appearance the basic relation through which a social practice is mediated.
28
In fact, it represents the abstraction of a plurality of multiple determinations’. It
is only ‘from the social and historical totality, of which the institutional practices
of literature are a part, that the practices of “active subjects” can be made
concrete’. Naumann insists that the practice of reading cannot be thought of as
constituting a causal relation between text and reader, however widely defined,
as theories of ‘effect’ or ‘uses and gratifications’ would imply. His description of
literature as an ‘area of experiment for social imagination’, while clearly
29
addressed to internal East German polemics, includes both Lenin’s view of
literary practice as ‘partisan’ and Brecht’s emphasis on emancipation, the
movement from the ‘self-evident’ to the ‘evident’. Reading, accordingly, is seen
as both the end-point and the starting-point of a complex of social, psychological
and aesthetic processes and practices. These practices, and the institutions from
which they are inseparable, are both the ‘stake’ and the ‘site’ of struggle. As
Brecht programmatically put it, ‘our critics must study the conditions of struggle