Colin MacCabe

Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1969)

Visual and Other Pleasures is a series of linked meditations on the politics of representation. Written from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, the pieces reflect commitments and changes within the Women’s Movement during that period: Mulvey’s self-reflexive account shows the broadening out of the Women’s Movement from a political organisation into a more general framework of feminism, a development that as regards consideration of representation runs from the interruptions of the spectacle of the 1970 Miss World contest to the later elaboration of a fully fledged cultural feminism, responsive to and newly inflecting theoretical trends. The critical appropriation of psychoanalysis, to which Mulvey contributed, was one such crucial inflection and is mapped out by the various pieces as they examine matters of spectacle and melodrama and avant-garde practice, ending with two major reconsiderations — one of which appears below — of the terms and politics and feminist theory. The celebrated essay on ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, conceived as radical intervention, used psychoanalytic theory to suggest a complex interaction of different ‘looks’ particular to cinema, arguing that conventional film establishes, irrespective of the sex of the viewer, a masculine voyeurism that must be refused, ‘destroyed’. That idea of the hold of the male gaze fixed to the female passivity it represents was then complicated by subsequent reflections on women’s enjoyment as spectators in the cinema, on the possibilities of visual pleasure. Yet how, other than as sexualised images, are women to be represented?

Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (1998)

This study of the mutual influences of modernism and psychoanalysis provides a largely missing and much-needed critical dimension for the understanding of British cultural and intellectual history in the war and post-war years. In common with the LDS books of Jacqueline Rose and Denise Riley, The Destructive Element moves between intellectual history, psychoanalytic and psychological theory, and feminist thought. The title is derived from Conrad’s Lord Jim ‘In the destructive element immerse’; an injunction that is here taken up in an examination of how theories of emotional aggression, the death drive and unconscious violence developed within and inflected or reinforced literary, critical and aesthetic directions in the mid-twentieth century.

Stanley Shostak, Death of Life: The Legacy of Molecular Biology (1998)

There is perhaps no more debilitating feature of modern thought than the almost unbridgeable division in the modern academy between science and the humanities. The dangers that C. P. Snow attempted to indicate in his 1959 Rede Lecture The Two Cultures have only increased in the decades since he wrote and no amount of Leavisite fulmination can get over the divide. If the history and philosophy of science can now be considered one of the key disciplines for defining the relations across the disciplines, it is still not the necessary point of reference that it should be. Stanley Shostak takes Cinderella as his muse, when, as a practising biologist, he sets out to describe the historical rise to power and the contemporary inadequacy of molecular biology. He reads the story of the rise to supremacy of the study of the gene as the death of the Cinderella of sciences, biology. His heretical account questions at every level the current dominance of molecular biology and suggests that it depends on a series of factors that have nothing to do with the kind of disinterested inquiry which science is meant to represent. His call for a much richer and more diverse biology makes clear how damaging the current divide between science and humanities is to both parties.

Jean-Jacques Lecercle; Interpretation as Pragmatics (1999)

The Language, Discourse, Society series has published several studies of language which have gone far beyond the familiar territory of a professional linguistics — most notably the translations of Jean-Claude Milner’s For the Love of Language and Michel Pecheux’s Language, Semantics, and Ideology. Resembling these in its departures from the customary range of linguists’ preoccupations but otherwise distinctive in its detailed and scrupulous iconoclasm, Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Interpretation as Pragmatics offers a new account of what it is to interpret a text. Exemplifying a thoroughly Deleuzian stress on the incalculable yet traceable workings of language from the outside, and following on from the author’s earlier The Violence of Language with its espousal of the forceful yet fertile seepage of words beyond their commonly supposed bounds, this book proposes that literary interpretations may be sometimes just and sometimes false, while never true. Interpretation here ceases to be seen as a tin-opener and is conceived instead, in neo-Wittgensteinian diction, as a language-game with several players: author, language, text, encyclopaedia, reader. The radiating centrality of the text in this new model does not, however, suppose any radical separability of the fictional from the quotidian, let alone any unique superiority of a literary—critical approach. Rather, the work of literary interpretation proceeds, as Lecercle demonstrates in painstaking detail, in ways closely comparable to what happens in face-to-face dialogue. Because the implications of such a pragmatic account of interpretation also have repercussions for a theory of how the human subject is linguistically installed and pinned in place, Paul Hirst’s early commentary on Althusser’s concept of interpellation (in his LDS volume On Law and Ideology) and Judith Butler’s more recent consideration of interpellation (in her Excitable Speech) receive an incisive critique and Lecercle develops an empathetic account of interpellation’s spasmodically emancipating harshness.

Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism (1990)

Stanley Aronowitz’s The Crisis in Historical Materialism was first published in the United States in 1981 and then reissued with new material in the LDS series. It is one of the key texts to have come out of the experience of the sixties, a decade marked by a wave of new interest in Marxist thought as the Stalinist hegemony dissolved. Figures such as Korsch and Lukacs whose work had been subject to the prohibitions of the Comintern resurfaced and the publication of Marx’s own early thinking on the relation between philosophy and economics in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts stimulated radical rethinking. Most importantly perhaps, Marcuse’s reworking of themes from the Frankfurt School and Althusser’s redrawing of the distinction between science and ideology provided many of the emphases that were to issue from the movements of 1968. But if the thinking of the New Left was an essential part of the heterogenous mix of economics, politics and culture which made up the sixties, that thinking was itself fundamentally unaffected by the heterogeneity of which it was a part. The great merit of Aronowitz’s book is its sustained attempt to produce a historical and social understanding fully adequate to that experience.

Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History, (1988)

Riley’s extended essay, devised as an argumentative contribution to the feminist historiography of the 1970s and 80s, suggests that the category of ‘women’ is to be deployed cautiously and strategically since its meanings are rarely straightforward; if used as an ever-reliable foundation, it will continue to produce more problems for contemporary feminist analysis than it solves. ‘Women’ as a category has its own elaborate — and profoundly political — history of production and use, is marked with strange temporalities, and is hardly more transhistorical than the category of ‘the homosexual’, the historical emergence of which has been shown by Foucault. The history of feminism is itself endemically vexed by the ambiguity of ‘women’ on which it is founded. The book reflects on the extent to which the newish ‘human science’ of sociology and the development of social policy at the turn of the century, in creating those very questions of ‘women’, posed as perhaps intractable, did not in fact establish forms of thought which, ostensibly in order to investigate ‘sexual difference’, constructed their own convictions in sexualised terms from the very beginning. The nineteenth-century intimacy between women and ‘the social’ is discussed as an invention of this kind, while the history of the suffrage in Britain is seen as an instance of past feminism’s productive games with the instability of ‘women’. For the present, reliance on ‘the body’ as the key to confounding modern anti-essentialism is argued to be worse than useless. The problems of ‘sexual difference’ cannot be resolved within epistemological frameworks inherited from the nineteenth-century human sciences, but must remain eternally smouldering away — in part because the problem of ‘sexual difference’ was itself at least partly constitutive in forming these very epistemologies

Christopher Norris, Resources of Realism: Prospects for ‘Post-Analytic’ Philosophy (1997)

Resources of Realism is concerned with current issues in epistemology and philosophical semantics. It defends a causal-realist approach to theories and explanations in the natural sciences and a truth-based propositional semantics for natural language derived from various sources. Among these sources — unusually in this kind of discussion — is the work of William Empson. Norris argues against various forms of anti-realist (or ontological—relativist) doctrine with regard both to the truth-claims of science and to the construal of intentions, meanings, and beliefs in the process of linguistic understanding. He also offers some incisive criticisms of the ‘hermeneutic turn’ in the philosophy of language and science, as well as of those kindred schools of thought that would relativise truth to some cultural context or background horizon of consensus beliefs.

Michel Pêcheux, Language,Semantics and Ideology (1982)

Published in French in 1975, Language, Semantics and Ideology was intended as a contribution to a materialist theory of discourse. Fundamental for such a theory was the recognition and analysis of non-subjective effects of meaning with ‘non-subjective’marking the necessary break to be made with all illusion of the subject as source of meaning. The ‘evidentness’ of assumptions regarding ‘the subject and language’ had to be critically refused and properly recast for theoretical understanding, this being the point of Pecheux’s extended argument with linguistics whose various accounts of language were seen as remaining dependent on just such pre-theoretical ‘evidentness’. ‘Semantics’, Pecheux’s central concern, had thus to involve the study of how meanings are produced and received within determinate discursive formations that include specific ‘subject forms’ themselves produced within such formations as the condition of subjectivity (of the individual as subject).

Denise Riley (ed.), Poets on Writing:Britain, 1970-1991 (1992)

Poets on Writing brings together writings about poetic practice by a number of contemporary poets, including those less popularly established and publicly recorded and those associated with innovative or self-consciously vanguardist tendencies or with the supposed ‘Cambridge School’. These groupings are neither defined nor revered, and the extracts were not organised according to any predetermined sociologies of their authors. The writers were left free to describe how they worked, or what they understood of the working practices of others by whom they were enthused, as also to indicate what they themselves made of the conditions for writing at the beginning of the 1990s. The aim of the collection was thus to give a number of poets the opportunity to reflect on their working habits and their sense of contexts, and so perhaps to pre-empt thereby the onrush of literary critics bearing categories. If ‘the author’ has officially died, the suspicion here was that the truth comes closer to cryogenic suspension; while a long freeze is to be sat out, it might nevertheless be entertaining in the meantime to record authors’ practices, without in so doing making a fetish of their authority. Sections of the book are concerned with the practicalities of poetic writing, the analysis of influences and contemporary directions and the examination of the histories of small press publication in Britain and of the reader—poet relationship. The collection included pieces by Wendy Mulford, Douglas Oliver, Tom Raworth, Nigel Wheale, and many others. The extract given here is from Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s still insufficiently known book Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry published posthumously in 1978; in it she argues for an understanding of the force of artifice as a vital adjunct to any reading.

Peter Gidal, Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett (1986)

Peter Gidal is an independent avant-garde film-maker and critic whose work, in both his films and his writings, has been concerned to combat the conditions of illusion inherent in representation —‘reproduction in any form’. What that work stresses and realises, therefore, is a materialist presentation of the construction of meanings, resisting terms of identification, narrative ordering, metaphorical relation: challenging all coherent presence of ‘subject’/‘reality’.