When two wrongs make it right · 11:29pm Mar 14th, 2016
I'm taking a class on literary theory from a local university. It turned to say a very little about how to write (one short essay by Poe), a bit more about theories of how art works (Aristotle, Addison, Burke, and the New Critics), and still more about post-modern linguistics and theory. But half of the course is about politics which literary theorists today oppose (capitalism, patriarchy, and white hegemony).
For the past 2 weeks we've been studying Marx. I may have made a few grumbling comments about Marxism being "the most thoroughly disproven theory in the history of the world," and that it should have been thrown out in 1849, and made a few unfavorable comparisons of its predictive powers with those of Ptolemaic astronomy and phlogiston theory, and possibly also mentioned that English departments were overrun with Marxists only when they were all kicked out of economics departments in the 1960s because they couldn't explain or predict anything. [1]
This week, we're studying Freud. 
And Lacan. 
[2]
We have assignments to take a quote from one reading assignment and relate it to another reading assignment. Sometimes (okay, most of the time), I would rather point out why both of the readings are misguided to begin with.
So I found it "cathartic" to relate Marx to Freud:
“First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e.,it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him –that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity –so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.”
Marx’s quote is in an excerpt of Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1844 in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (p. 655). The quote is the second to last paragraph in the excerpt. Before the quote, Marx discusses “political economy.” Because of political economy, the worker is “the most wretched of commodities” (652). The worker, as a commodity, loses his humanistic ideas and becomes “cheaper” because the price of a product does not depend on the labor put into a product. Price is determined by the price of competing products; profit does not make a difference to the worker as their wage is kept as low as possible. The work alienates the worker because it has nothing to do with the worker’s human qualities. Work strips the worker of his internal self. The quoted passage puts these ideas together by describing the relationship of labor and the worker (labor is external). The final paragraph of the excerpt, after the chosen quotation, explains that the worker is no longer an “active man” but is reduced to his animal functions. He is reduced to his animal functions because he is not acting on his own ideas.
I wrote:
Freud writes, "We are thus presented with a new task which had no previous existence: the task, that is, of investigating the relations between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing out the processes by which the latter have been changed into the former. The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages.... A transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-formation, and it is as a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the dream thoughts comes about." (p. 818-820)
We also see, on pages 817-818, that Freud considers it equally valid to apply these principles to the writings a person makes while awake, as he does to Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Marx is obsessed with overcoming the capitalists and the bourgeois. Collectively, they clearly symbolize the father-figure Marx wishes to overthrow.
In the quoted passage and what follows, Marx portrays the worker as subject to pressure from two aspects of himself: from his own unhappiness with his own labor, and from his "animal functions". The worker symbolizes Marx's ego, his self-concept. The "animal" which Marx sees as threatening to degrade him to a less than human state is Marx's id. This leaves labor to represent the super-ego, the internalized cultural rules.
Marx's narrative, therefore, symbolizes his fantasy that the need for labor is not the natural state of humanity, but a recent cultural imposition of the super-ego, alien to human existence, forced upon it by the capitalist father-figure. This reflects Marx's resentment of his own father, Heinrich Marx, who forced him to study law rather than philosophy and literature on the grounds that he was paying for Karl's college so that Karl could get a job.
Marx repressed this explicit statement of his desire, which is culturally unacceptable as a transparent juvenile fantasy, and instead constructed a symbolic representation in which work is not a physical necessity ("not the satisfaction of a need"), but a demand imposed by the capitalist (representing Marx's father).
Marx's stance is exactly opposite that of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in "The Yellow Wallpaper": She writes of the necessity of "work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power." Marx, by contrast, constructs an elaborate fantasy explaining work as a recent invention which humanity is unaccustomed to and unadapted to. Marx says that work leads to "loss of self"; Gilman says deprivation of work leads to loss of self.
[1] Marx made lots of testable claims, like "The price of labor is not subject to supply and demand," "Wages are inversely proportional to productivity," "The division of labor makes wages go down," and "Capitalism caused power to become more centralized than it had been under absolute monarchy," and his important claims turn out to be mostly false. He also made a lot of less-testable claims which seem dubious at best, e.g., that medieval serfs were happier than modern workers, and that it would be best for everyone if marriage were abolished and parents weren't responsible for raising their children. Note, though, that Marxism is not the same as socialism--it's just one type of socialism.
[2] I'm going to publish a pony story about Jacques Lacan sometime soon. This didn't inspire it. I wrote it last year.
Not feeling the Bern, I take it, Bad Horse?
3808181 Bernie's a socialist, not a Marxist. Um. I assume.
Marxism needs to refer back to Marx. People who say "I'm a Marxist, except for these 117 positions of Marx which I don't agree with," should find a new word for whatever they are. I doubt Bernie is calling for violent revolution or the abolition of the family.
(Sometimes people use "Marxism" to mean "historical materialism / materialistic determinism". I don't think they should do that.)
Socialism is really a value system, not an economic theory. Socialists develop economic theories, but they know that their economics proceed from their values, not the other way around as Marxism pretends. Marxism is a value system pretending to be an economic theory. The problem with that is that people sometimes try to implement the economic theory.
3808202 Bern considers himself a socialist, but only he knows what exactly he mean by that.
3808202 Ehhh, in the end, the difference results in semantics.
EDIT: But yes, he claims socialism.
3808202 Democratic Socialist, which as I take it is fancy speak for "hey maybe strong social safety nets and making some services, like healthcare, publicly funded is a good idea."
All that said, holy shit. Maybe my high school and college sucked, but never in my wildest dreams did I expect to read a Freudian analysis of Marx. So, thanks for adding that item to, and checking it off from, my to-do list. In full disclosure, I didn't go very far in college. Smarty-pants classes with a 4.2 GPA in high school, though. Until I dropped out.
Anyway. Your blog serves as photon based mind expansion drug as usual, Bad Horse.
So what grade did you get?
Also I want the "Street Fighter" skins for this.
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3808202 when people in Facebook comments sections refer to Bernie or his supporters with the word Marxist, I laugh on the outside and cry on the inside
Wow. Wow. For better or worse, Marx and Freud are influential historical figures, but why would anyone mention them in a literary theory class? Just because a lot of their claims didn't apply to the real world doesn't make them fiction writers.
That being said, fantastic analysis.
3808202 "... Marxism is a value system pretending to be an economic theory. The problem with that is that people sometimes try to implement the economic theory...."
If it were merely a value system implemented as economic theory, it would not be that bad, as there are a few hundred weird ideas tried out as economic theories every decade or so. I think it's the body count that really puts me off.
You don't learn theory by skipping to the "right" ideas. You have to participate in the dialectic to understand it, or at least simulate the experience of participating in it.
3808319 You do learn a real theory by skipping to the right ideas. Physics courses don't teach Aristotelian physics. Microbiology courses don't teach vitalism, spontaneous generation, or Lamarckian evolution.
The dialectic itself is worthless. A theory should provide understanding, answers, predictions. "Dialectic" is an excuse for not rejecting bad theories. This all started because Hegel didn't understand logic. Hegelian dialectic is a logically illicit process. The dialectic process used in literary theory is worse than useless; it teaches students not to judge, not to think, and destroys their capacity for analysis and their understanding of what analysis is. IMHO. I laugh every time I hear someone justify philosophy or English departments by saying they teach students how to think.
3808202
I don't think Bernie Sanders even is a socialist, honestly. He doesn't mention the world "socialism" anywhere on his website (or at the very least, didn't the last time I checked) and as far as I can tell is in favor of private ownership of capital. I think what he actually is is a "social democrat", i.e. a capitalist who believes in an economic system more similar to Sweden, which is certainly a capitalist country.
Of course, the fact that he formerly seemed very fond of socialism is somewhat concerning, but on the other hand, people do sometimes wise up.
Right now I'm deliberating between voting for him and Hillary, but I don't have to choose for several more months. Unfortunately, both of them have political views I'm not tremendously fond of; Sanders doesn't seem to properly understand the value of international trade agreements (which are pretty important) and I'm not sure if he's really capable as a politician in terms of getting stuff done, while Hillary has a long list of stupid positions (Iraq War, complaining about violent video games, her support for frivolous lawsuits against firearms manufacturers, ect.) which show poor judgement to me, but on the other hand, I do know she understands the value of international diplomacy and trade. And that's kind of one of the most important things that the president does.
Anyway, your English teacher sounds like a bit of an idiot.
Then again, this seems to be a general problem plaguing some sectors of academia.
3808285 He isn't a pure Marxist, no, but the similarities twixt the two (Marxism and Socialism) far outweigh the differences.
There is a pdf online of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter's classic. I expect you would enjoy at least the first paragraph or two of the first chapter, which discusses Marx's merits as a prophet, and perhaps the rest as well.
Possibly Stiglitz's Whither Socialism? is a fine introduction to a modern defense of the scientific merits of socialism, if you have some familiarity with the Walrasian system. Previous socialist economics was, ironically, based on the idea that capitalism works. It doesn't, Stiglitz argues (to paraphrase), and so socialism failed, being based on unsound economics. But what if it was based on a sounder economics?
I shall write a bit in defense of Marx by way of Knight when I am done with the current ponynomics arc.
3808353 She's just doing what every other teacher of literary theory does. It would be irresponsible not to teach students what the system currently expects them to know.
3808420
Clearly she needs to read the parable of the bridge jumpers.
Someone important probably wrote that, right?
I'm so sorry for your loss.
Many braincells obviously died in great agony to get us this far into a cathartic exercise.
3808343
This isn't really correct; I'm more familiar with biology than I am with physics, so I won't speak on them, but I know for a fact that biology does indeed talk about things like vitalism, spontaneous generation and Lamarchkian evolution, at different points. Vitalism, iirc, was mostly brought up at the high school level as we were discussing the various theories that led up to the current understanding of biology, but spontaneous generation is something that comes up fairly often largely due to the third tenet of cell theory (ie cells come from preexisting cells.) This third part of the theory didn't come into play until somewhat later after the first two tenets of cell theory were proposed.
Lamarckian evolution probably has little place in microbiology, but it can and does come up in classes on evolution, both, primarily, as a contrast to evolution and to show it doesn't work, and in recent years as a sort of seed idea to explain epigenetics--not necessarily suggesting that what Lamarck proposed was correct, but rather in the sense 'it might be the case that, in spite of this, certain non-genetic things, typically related to the environment, get inherited by the offspring.'
And I've seen Freud brought up, in brief, in psychology courses as well--almost always to provide historical background.
But, in a way, this is all an aside to literary theory: it's not something that I've studied myself, but a quick look at Wikipedia suggests that literary theory, as a field, is about applying moral/philosophical/sociology/etc as a way of interpreting or examining literary works. Essentially examining works through a Marxist point of view, or a feminist one, or whatever have you. Freud's theory, for example, could be applied to the so-called "power trio" of main characters in a 'Freudian trio' style interpretation of them and the role they play in the story telling. Obviously, Tvtropes isn't a scholarly work, but it wouldn't be surprising if this sort of interpretation wouldn't be applied. And applied regardless of the value of Freudian psychology.
3808499 Spontaneous generation & Lamarckian evolution get described, but you don't spend weeks studying the original writings of Lamarck and whoever wrote first about spontaneous generation, and taking them seriously. At some point the professor will say, "There are some problems with Lamarck's reasoning, and his conclusions don't match certain facts." That doesn't happen in literary theory or philosophy.
Only since the 1960s. Originally--I mean in the days of the Greeks and Romans, up until about 1700--literary theory was about how to write. Then it became more literary criticism from the perspective of the reader, plus biographies of writers. Then sometime in the mid 19th century, literature began to be studied in college, and history and philology got added to the mix, and the art of how to write was left out. Literary criticism got tangled up with Romanticism, becoming increasingly subjective and touchy-feely, a description of how people felt about stories rather than about what they meant or how they worked.
Then in the 1920s there was a sharp reaction called the New Criticism, which said that literary theory ought to be about how poems worked, and why some poems were better than others, and all that history and biography should be used only as context for that, not as the primary thing to study.
Then around 1960, there was a sharp, sudden counter-revolution against that, using the tools of post-modernism to argue that poems weren't better than others, and the ones that people said were better were all written by white men, and they couldn't mean anything anyway since meaning was impossible, and what we really needed to do was use literature as a weapon for social change. It was much like how evangelical Christianity was turned into a tool of the Republican party in the 1980s.
3808319 BTW, I'll admit that a student should know Plato's idealism and Aristotle's two unities in order to understand the next 2000 years of art history, but a student shouldn't study stuff that is both (a) important only to literary theorists, but not to any works of literature, and (b) nonsense or wild speculation. Like Althuser or Lacan. Or Plato's argument that a writer can't be any good, since a writer needs to reproduce chairs and tables and buildings and so on, and if the writer actually could do that, why, the writer would just make real chairs and tables and buildings instead. That's a stupid argument, it was stupid when he made it, and we should let it drop.
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Not many biologists who really go into spontaneous generation.
I suppose one of the issues is, there are still psychiatrists who are Freudians.
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Probably means "I think the Canadians are doing something right".
Which is weird, right? Because Capital, along with Wealth of Nations, form the two pillars upon which the entire edifice of modern economics is built. It doesn't matter if you're freshwater, saltwater, Keynesian, neoliberal, a green-eyeshade disciple of Rand or an unreconstructed Trotskyite; your economic philosophy and your understanding of a either a modern market system or proposed alternatives to one is going to trace back directly to Capital in real, concrete, and provenly useful ways.
3808353
He absolutely is, for a given value of "socialist."
Bernie Sanders falls well within the boundaries of a number of socialist theories. He's basically a New Deal Democrat... but the thing is, the New Deal and the economic framework surrounding it was understood by many of the people implementing it as a socialist endeavor. (Also by many of the people opposed to it.) The fact that it was also seen as a last-ditch effort to preserve capitalism by many involved in it doesn't change that; indeed, it was actually both at once. It might be argued that "socialism" is a useless term if the umbrella is that wide, but, well, that's where we're at.
(When most people hear "socialism" they think "state socialism." There are way more iterations of it than that. I know personally a number of syndicalists, and syndicalism is certainly a form of socialism despite the fact that capital and the means of production remain in private hands.)
Here's the thing about Sanders still describing himself as a socialist. Bernie Sanders is a lot more pragmatic than people give him credit for; he's managed for decades to thread the delicate needle of "don't be that guy howling uselessly into the void" and "total sellout," which is an impressive political feat. He's always been flexible within certain hard limits.
His claiming of that label has a lot more to do about the very specific circumstances of Vermont politics in the mid-70s than anything else. Back then the label was both useful to him and inoffensive to him, so he claimed it as a shrewd political move to help get himself elected. He stuck with it for decades because, well... he's proud of where he came from (his early campaigns were hard) and was unwilling to divorce himself from his political roots in that way, and he probably didn't think he'd ever run for President. Once he did start running for President, even if he'd wanted to, it was too late to distance himself even if he'd wanted to, because an enormous part of his campaign is based on authenticity and running away from his past would undercut that.
It's a boring explanation, because it doesn't involve him either being a liar or some sort of Manchurian candidate, and it tends to cut off depressingly lengthy debates about whether he's going to order death squads to liquidate the Kulaks, but there you go.
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No we don't, it's true, but at the same time we also don't spend very much time reading Darwin's original work either, although we do keep coming back to it repeatedly.
The problem is that you seem to be trying to apply empirical thought to what is in essence philosophy; this isn't a bad thing, so to speak, but its important to realize that while many authors might find X theory to be 'disproved' or fatally flawed, it doesn't necessarily mean it vanishes from consciousness--save in cases where the problems are large and the resolutions or answers to those problems don't seem to be valid. For example, you have to work hard to find someone who holds categorical imperative in any straight form as you'd find it presented by Kant.
Ultimately literary theory is philosophy.
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To me, Socialism means "the means of production are owned by The People" (the capital letters are important).
Wikipedia defines it as "a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production."
If your system lacks democratic control of the means of production AND lacks social ownership, I wouldn't really call it socialism. Syndicalism is, I think, pretty clearly a form of socialism, as it is about social ownership.
Also, I have to say, that is one of the most sinister-sounding economic philosophies I've heard named. Seriously, is any group called a "syndicate" ever good?
I think if you redefine socialism to make it mean other things, you make it take on such a broad definition that it loses all meaning. Of course, people have done exactly this, and... well, some people call pretty much everything socialism, and it becomes meaningless.
Also, as far as "running from his roots": his website doesn't seem to really mention socialism, so I think he's kind of conveniently sidestepping the issue, really.
3808343 You obviously don't understand the value of Common Core. How are our children supposed to know how to solve problems correctly if we don't leave them wander around in the field of muddled thoughts while trying to find their own method? (/snark) Seriously, Common Core was invented to make New Math look good.
3808667 New Math and Common Core both suffer from the problem that there's a significant difference between knowing how to "solve" an arithmetic or algebra problem with a simple-but-obscuring algorithm and actually learning about the underlying logic of mathematics and number systems. The former is actually pretty hard to teach by itself, the later is really really really hard to teach, and primary and secondary schoolteachers usually have not been properly equipped by their training to do the latter.
This is somewhat problematic, in my opinion, when it comes to crafting public education policy that is both coherent and acceptable. Like, a lot of people tend to go "Science! Math! We should teach kids this stuff early and encourage them into those fields!" Well, okay. Math is hard and takes a long time to learn. And simply learning how to brute-force arithmetic and basic algebra doesn't actually teach you jack shit. The systems by which most people learn to do arithmetic, by physically writing out the arabic numerals and referencing them to each other, are basically giant cheat codes that are 100% geared towards "get the answer" and 0% geared towards "why did you get this answer; why do the systems work the way they do." There's some evidence that they can actually be detrimental to people developing higher math skills later in life.
So, okay. You try and teach around that by starting with trying to get kids to understand the system they're working in. But it turns out when you do that parents go "what is this fuckery; why aren't you just teaching my kid to do arithmetic. I don't understand this stuff, my kid has no hope of doing so." And it's like "weren't you the same people howling about how we need to get the kids started on this stuff early? How you want them to grow up to be architects and engineers and suchly? Well, these are the first steps! If we wait until high school and college that's actually waiting too long!"
My cousin was recently grousing about how her kids school is trying to teach them "subtraction by addition." She was real sneery about it, like "subtraction isn't addition! It's subtraction! Even I know that." And, well, subtraction by addition (the complements method) is clunky and actually usually really shitty if your only goal is "teach the kid to arrive at the correct answer to a subtraction problem as efficiently as possible" but is really very good if your goal is "try and get them to understand how and why numbers relate to each other."
So this puts people trying to cut the gordian knot in a bind, because in their view, what they're being asked to do is craft incoherent policy; they're told the goal is "prepare kids for math and science vocations" but when they try and do that it turns out that what people mean by that is "in a way that doesn't offend my sensibilities, whether or not it actually does what we say we want."
(It could also be argued that what we really need is a massive reformation of how we train and equip teachers before we go after the curriculum itself.)
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I just had an argument with someone else over Capital a week ago, who claimed Capital gave empirical support to its arguments. So I went thru the first 200 pages of it, and copied down every statement giving empirical support for a proposition. There were 10 such statements (counting liberally), averaging one every 20 pages. They were almost all in the footnotes, and they supported only tangential points. So I still maintain that Capital, and Marx's other writings, are not grounded in reality and rely more on disdaining than on using economic concepts. Marx was a propagandist and a religious crusader with a new prophetic eschatology, not an economist. He knew some economic writings, but he just sprinkled it around his propaganda to make it look scientific. His discussion of economic phenomena sounds more theological than economic.
I don't think he understood economics. Anyone who holds the labor theory of value, thinks all "surplus value" comes from workers, thinks wages are commodities that magically defy supply and demand, and describes money as "the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities," literally does not know the first thing about business or economics.
Also, I recently re-read The Communist Manifesto, and my recollection is that all or nearly all of its important claims--the things that make Marxism different from what came before--were wrong. To a shocking degree.
Can you give examples? New economic laws, equations, or principles discovered by Marx and believed and used by non-Marxist economists today?
My edition of Capital is 2800 pages long. I find it hard to believe anybody even reads the thing. Even if it has 200 pages of new and good insights, would that be performing any better than random?
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Even if literary theory were philosophy, the thing called "philosophy" in college is not philosophy. The discipline closest to answering philosophical questions is artificial intelligence. Evolutionary theory, neuroscience, mathematics, economics, anthropology, linguistics, history, and probably even art and literature, also have critical relevant information. All those fields have data. The least-qualified people in the world to address philosophical and ethical questions, except for ethicists, are the ones with philosophy degrees. They have no data and no experience interpreting data. They don't just know nothing relevant themselves; they've spent a century building justifications for ignoring anyone who does.
My problem with current literary theorists is not that they want to address the philosophical question of what art is. My problem with them is that, like philosophers, they have no epistemology. "Dialectic" is code meaning "non-empirical, rhetorically persuasive argument". They think a good argument is one that has poetic force and emotional appeal. They don't know the difference between logic, empiricism, and statistics, or between truth and information. They avoid evidence. They cite people from the 19th century as the ultimate authorities in what are now fast-moving high-tech fields, who did not know enough about their fields to write one page of a modern textbook. They don't know what distinguishes a good argument from a bad one.
3808577 If by Freudian you mean "does Freudian psychoanalysis", I think the answer is no. At least, I minored in psychology and never heard Freud mentioned, psychologists I know don't respect Freud, I haven't heard of anybody offering Freudian analysis in my lifetime outside of Woody Allen movies, and my lit theory teacher says Freud isn't taken seriously by psychologists anymore.
If by Freudian you mean "believes in the power of the subconscious", then everybody is a Freudian.
3808712 I don't get it. What does the complements method teach you about how numbers relate to each other? It seems like all it says is a - b = a + (c - b) - c. It's useful in building CPUs, but I don't see what else it's good for.
"Karl! What have I told you about slacking off? Get back to your law homework!"
"But Daaaaaad, I'm tired of it!"
"Too bad, it's my money so I decide how you spend it."
"But I don't wanna be a lawyer!"
"Oh yeah? What do you want?"
"To be a philosopher! To...to show the masses, that...that labor is external to the individual! It is not natural to him, oh no. In it he denies himself! It is not his own labor, but forced upon him, causing him to become like the animal, losing his self in the process!"
"..."
"You're not getting out of doing your homework."
"Damn."
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Speaking of economics: your third paragraph makes me consider a marginal-benefit-ish perspective on the Democratic primary. Becoming president would probably increase Hillary Clinton's utility more, in the sense that she (infamously) very much wants to president --Bernie Sanders seems to see it as an especially useful tool to effect his policy goals, but different from his work so far in degree, not kind. But it would probably increase Sanders' productivity more, in the sense that Clinton has already had a lot of opportunity to influence US international policy, and since her views are more mainstream Sanders' would get more of a "bully pulpit" boost. So if you don't care about their actual positions, you should vote for Clinton to make her happy but Sanders to make your vote change the world more.
EDIT: You should care about their actual positions and vote based on that, though.
3808373 Thanks for the ref! I've said many of the things in that first chapter myself.
Can you comment on 3808595 and 3808717 ?
3808724
Might just be a result of different schools (and possibly schooling level.) but I distinctly recall my psychology teacher back in high school (admittedly that is over a decade ago now) stating that there were still psychiatrists who practiced psychoanalysis.
So how does one go about learning actual literary theory today? Are there even uni courses for that?
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In short, they're guys who think that having a PhD in one field makes them an authority in all fields.
This is not a new thing. In fact my father warned me about it when I was just a kid. Yeah, my family's kinda weird. Doesn't mean the warning wasn't useful.
3808797 People disagree about what "literary theory" means. The people who control the dialogue include the editors of the PMLA (Proceedings of the Modern Language Association), the editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, the editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, whatever editor (like Hazard Adams) can publish a big book on literary theory and get it used as a textbook, plus (I suppose?) the chairs of English departments at major universities.
If you want to study how stories and poems work, I suggest (as previously) Understanding Fiction, and also Praising it New (articles by New Critics) and The Well Wrought Urn (about poetry). Right now I'm reading a thin book on medieval theories of art by Umberto Eco that TheJediMasterEd recommended, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, which is amazingly well-researched, easy to read, and best book on that topic I've found that's in English. It seems serious research into the Middle Ages tends to be in French or some other Romance language, and the original sources are in Latin.
I'm putting together an outline of what I call "Writing Theory", by which I mean a theory of how to write, and hope to work through it over the next couple of years. The only point of arguing over what "literary theory" is, is to get a slice of the dollars spent on English departments, and influence "the dialectic", and the opinions of editors and publishers. But then I thought--what's the point of that? I want to know how to write. Getting a degree in English wouldn't help me write. Degrees are more to impress people and get your resume on someone's desk than to teach you things. English departments are unimportant. And editors and publishers are becoming unimportant, too; writing is going more and more thru small presses, direct-to-consumer e-books, websites like this, and so on. Why fight a dying establishment? Easier to build an entirely new writing and publishing industry from the ground up.
Vincent Leitch, the current editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, explained his opinion on the matter in the first chapter of Literary Criticism in the 21st Century. The TL;DR is that he had financial troubles, and his daughter had trouble paying for college, and this seemed unreasonable to him, so he decided he had to fight for social change. The fact that his job description was "English professor" doesn't seem to have entered into his decision. He felt he had a moral obligation to do what he thought was most important, rather than (my addition) an obligation to do what he had been hired to do and what his students were paying for him to do. Nobody stopped him, so that's what he did.
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You're right that he presents it that way. I think, though, this presentation relies on an imaginary past in which things were different, and people got to work on what they wanted to work on, and owned the products of their labor. My analysis of what he said is that it reduces to "work is bad" for most people over at least the past 3000 years. Most people were peasants, tenant farmers, or day laborers, and owned at most some fraction of the products of their labor, which was not an artisanal product but a big batch of homogenous stuff which was "fetishized" in just the same way Marx said money was. His arguments about the manner in which money alienated people from the product of their labor apply just as well to a sharecropper who produces a barnful of wheat. He's not going to eat all that wheat.
IMHO Marx's bizarre, theological views on money disqualify him from being an economist. He hates money. It's like claiming you're an auto mechanic when all you do is tell everyone who brings their car to your shop to get a horse.
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Hey, if it wasn't for those pesky concerns with money and profit, bookplayer's Auto Shop and Horse Dealership would be doing just fine.
I'm totally being oppressed.
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Thank you. I'll see if I can find those books.
What do you think of Dramatica, by the way? I think I got the link from one of your blogs, but I'm not sure.
3808712 This is a fantastic point. I feel like so much of the opposition to Common Core comes down to "you're actually making my kids smarter than me? Now I feel dumb!"
I'm not remembering that story, but I would say that the idea of reading something tragic does give a certain catharsis, and, while I don't feel 'great', I will often feel slightly better/comforted by the release/getting my mind off my own problems
3809458 Praising it New is the hardest to read. I like a lot of things about Dramatica, but everything works out too neatly--I think it's too much of a coincidence for all story structure to boil down to their neat little 4 x 4 grids inside other 4x4 grids. Particularly since they end up with too many spots in their grids to fill in. They end up with, like, a 16 x 16 grid, and look at maybe 20 different stories and see if they can come up with labels for the 256 spots in that 16 x 16 grid so that all 20 stories will fit, and of course they do, because 256 > 20. So take Dramatica with more than a grain of salt.
3809814 That's true. I don't think it has to do with ownership. I think hunters like hunting more than factory workers like working on an assembly line. Agriculture was when work started sucking.
It's hard to pursue the "alienated labor / traditional labor relations were better" line of thought without ending up in "women should stay home and take care of the kids", though. I guess a Marxist wouldn't, since a Marxist doesn't believe in human nature. The extrapolation of Marxist ideals plus evolutionary psychology would. Evo psych provides worse problems for Marxism than that, though, since it says people try to maximize their genetic fitness, and they have to not do that for communism to work in large communities.
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I'm thinking that learning about Marxism and Freudianism is important to the study of literary theory because historically, a lot of literary criticism has referenced both systems, and you have to understand them (even if they're bullshit) to understand that.
It's like, you may not give a rat's ass whether it's wrong or right to worship formal painted saint's images, but if you want to study the Middle Ages you really should understand the difference between an iconoclast and an iconodule.
And if you happen to learn that difference from a true believer, so what? The knowledge is no less valuable. And "altar boy" is a great place to start out:
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Most economists have read neither the Wealth of Nations nor Capital, nor is modern economics based on either. Both, of course, have had an influence on the historical development of economics.
If you want a text every economist has some familiarity with, this is more like it.
I have so much to say about this... I honestly need to take a deep breath and think about it a bit more first...
There are some aspects of Marx's theory that, in my opinion, are misinterpreted here. Especially the idea that Marx somehow opposed work. Quite honestly, I feel you've created an opposition between Marx and Gilman where there isn't one by failing to distinguish what Marx means by alienated labour.
Marx is not arguing that work is something humanity is 'unaccustomed and unadapted to', rather the opposite in fact. Work and productive activity are, in a Marxist analysis, essential to the expression of man's species-being. The point of his analysis is that, in a system of capitalist production, this expression of oneself through productive activity is thwarted and becomes the alienated or 'coerced' labour Marx describes in the passage you quoted.
It's not Marx's view that man does not want to work but rather that, in a system of capitalist oppression, because the worker does not ultimately own the product of his labour he must be compelled to preform it. Basically, Marx is not saying that work is unnatural, rather it is capitalism that postulates that work and productive enterprise is something that must be imposed on man through the threat of privation.
The labourer under capitalism does not own what he produces, the capitalist does, while the labourer himself is forced to sell his capacity to do labour for a wage, and in so doing, is alienated from that very power through which he expresses his humanity, leading to the wretched state Marx describes.
To put it in simple terms, if one works an eight hour shift for $7.50 an hour the end result is $60. It doesn't matter if you pour your heart and soul into the work, the result is still $60. If you buckle down and work really really hard... you still get $60, the capitalist who owns the product of your labour will have that much more profit, and you will be that much more exhausted at the end of it. Of course, the capitalist faces the dilemma of keeping his workers working hard, and so, not content to merely alienate the worker from the product of his labour, ensures that the labourer is alienated from his fellow man by fostering competition... The response of the capitalist to this realisation of the reality of alienated labour is usually something along the lines of, "Yes, it's true you'll make $60 no matter what... but if you are a good worker maybe I'll reward you, and if you are a bad one I'll replace you!"
Which, essentially means, if a worker is a good slave to the power of capital, and works really hard, they'll get first pick of the scraps from the master's table, and a whip to beat their fellow slaves with on the master's behalf.
Of course, this is all just my take on this. I'm not really looking to upset anyone, and I might just be taking your entire post way too seriously. I just really really enjoy this sort of thing. Also, I'm not done yet... not even close... there is SOOO much I disagree with I'm giddy with excitement!
Kind regards,
MarxyHooves
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Yes, that was what Marx meant; see my earlier reply to Antsan. I think his analysis is based not in reality, but in a vague, never-specified fantasy about a presumably happier, presumably agricultural past. If you think about working conditions before capitalism, there's no obvious reason why his analysis would apply to workers under capitalism, but not under all other systems of the previous 3000 years. (History did not go hunter/gatherers - capitalism.) Marx would have needed to describe the previous systems, contrast them with labor under capitalism, and show a difference (a) in working conditions and relations to work output, and (b) in the feelings of the worker.
In honesty, though, I think that even if he'd done that, I'd find it unconvincing. His language is too theological. He is talking about abstract entities with no clear or agreed-on definitions, which may not even exist, whose rhetorical purpose is not to convey information ('coz they don't) but to sound grand enough to inspire indignance. "External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification"--how would you know it if you saw it? Why does driving a carriage to deliver ice for an ice company cause this mortification, but driving a carriage to deliver wheat to a mill does not? Why is working for money worse than working for no money because otherwise you'll be whipped and eventually kicked out of your (the landlord's) house? Why is stacking bricks to build a bank more alienating than stacking bricks to build a cathedral or a pyramid? Etc.
Well, your reply sort of leads me to another disagreement I had with your presentation of Marx, where do you get the notion that "medieval serfs were happier than modern workers." Where do you find Marx saying this?
As to your claim that, "Marx would have needed to describe the previous systems, contrast them with labor under capitalism, and show a difference (a) in working conditions and relations to work output, and (b) in the feelings of the worker." Marx does do precisely this, in several instances, the opening pages of The German Ideology, for example, elaborate how systems of production developed, starting with primitive tribal communal ownership, then ancient communal and state ownership, feudalism, and eventually the development of early capitalism...
Under feudalism, as under capitalism, the worker was still exploited and alienated, the only difference being that feudalism existed during an epoch where the means of production were significantly less developed. There is, ultimately very little difference between the condition of exploited labour under feudalism and that of exploited labour under capitalism from the perspective of the exploited labourer...
Feudalism, however, like the system of ancient slavery, ultimately imposed limits on the development of productivity. From generation to generation agricultural productivity was largely stagnant. The easiest way for the feudal lords to gain more wealth was to exploit more people. There was therefore a perpetual impulse to warfare, the net effect of which was to waste and destroy the productive forces. This ultimately led to the displacement of the feudal land-owning class by the capital owning burghers of the towns and cities, i.e. the bourgeoisie.
So, to answer your question, "How is it different?", from the perspective of the labourer it largely isn't, save that there exist more or less developed systems to exploit man's productive forces, e.g. under serfdom there was the whip and violent compulsion, but there did exist some level of "responsibility" on the part of the land owning class to ensure their peasants didn't starve to death, under capitalism, there is competition and the threat of replacement by surplus labour...
Speaking of labour, I need to go to work, but I would really be very happy to continue the conversation afterwards!
Kind Regards,
Marxyhooves