Chapter 1 - Marxist Theories From A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory by Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker Sunday, 26 July 2020 39 PM Introduction * This chapter begins by discussing two well-known statements put forth by Karl Marx: %* 1. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. What does Marx mean by this statement ? Ans: A person's thoughts tend to be shaped by his or her political and economic circumstances. The subordinate people come to believe in their subordination - the peasants to accept the rule of the aristocracy, the factory workers to accept the rule of the owners, and so on. This belief in one's own subordination, which comes about through ideology, is, for Marx, false consciousness. %*2. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. Both these statements were provocative. By contradicting widely accepted doctrines, Marx was trying to put people’s thoughts into reverse gear. © Firstly, philosophy has been merely airy contemplation; it is time that it engaged with the real world. © Secondly, Hegel and his followers in German philosophy have persuaded us that the world is governed by laws of Reason. People have been led to believe that their ideas, their cultural life, their legal systems, and their religions were the creations of divine reason, which should be regarded as the unquestioned guides to human life. * Marx reverses this formulation and argues that all ideological systems are the products of social and economic existence. Legal systems, for example, are not the pure manifestations of human or divine reason, but ultimately reflect the interests of the dominant class in particular historical periods. * Marx described this view in terms of an architectural metaphor: the ‘superstructure’ (ideology, politics) rests upon the ‘base’ (socio-economic relations). Through this metaphor, Marx was arguing that the relations of exploitation and domination which govern the social and economic order of a particular phase of human history will in some sense ‘determine’ the whole cultural life of the society. Marxist views regarding Art and Literature * Ina famous series of letters written in the 1890s Engels insists that, while he and Marx always regarded the economic aspect of society as the ultimate determinant of other aspects, they also recognised that art, philosophy and other forms of consciousness are ‘relatively autonomous’ and possess an independent ability to alter men’s existence. Literature and art belong to the ideological sphere, but possess a relationship to ideology which is less direct than is found in the case of religious, legal and philosophical systems. * The special status of literature is recognised by Marx ina celebrated passage in his Grundrisse. Greek tragedy is considered a peak of literary development and yet it coincides with a social system and a form of ideology (Greek myth) which are no longer valid for modern society. The problem for Marx was to explain how an art and literature produced in a long- obsolete social organisation can still give us aesthetic pleasure and be regarded as ‘a standard and unattainable ideal’. He seems to be accepting reluctantly a certain ‘timelessness’ and ‘universality’ in literature and art; reluctantly, because this would be a major concession to one of bourgeois ideology’s premises. However, it is now possible to see that Marx was simply falling back on received (Hegelian) ways of thinking about literature and art. It may now be safely established as part of the Marxist view: that canons of great literature are socially generated. The greatness of Greek tragedy is not a universal and unchanging fact of existence, but a value which must be reproduced from generation to generation.