Latour and Bourdieu

Evan has just written a great series of posts on Latour and Bourdieu over at our Latour blog. I have been trying to get more into Bourdieu myself over the past year (at the suggestion of a professor), and I enjoy him a lot. But Evan has been actually working a while within the Bourdieuvian framework--as the thoroughness with which he compares Latour and Bourdieu shows. Here are the posts: "Creature of Habitus," "Agents → Actors," "Beneath Contempt, Beyond Critique."

Derrida and science

In my remarks on "Derrida and Speculative Realism," one of you left a wonderful comment addressing my remark that Derrida "lacks any significant engagement with science," pointing out that I should have mentioned the work on François Jacob, as well as consider the Origin of Geometry, which are areas in which Derrida dabbles or dips into science--alongside Leroi-Gourhan, who I mention in the post. My response was what follows. In short, I agreed, but I also thought it was important to try and think the relationship between Derrida and science very precisely. But before I get into that first and foremost one has to, as my commentator emphasized, immediately disqualify any notion that Derrida is outright hostile to science. There's just nothing in the record to suggest that. The Sokals of the world might want to show something intrinsic lies between postmodernists and science, but Derrida isn't simply a postmodernist (and not only because he explicitly says he isn't), and such accounts don't prove much anyway in the first place, other than that there is a complex relationship between the humanities, the structures we call postmodern and which characterize our cultural moment, and science, which I think is best comprehended sociologically--not in self-aggrandizing, staged "events," by which we really mean, "media events" (and in the popular, pejorative, and even now wholly conservative sense of "media"), whose only deplorable function is to stir up anti-intellectualism (of which there is much too much already in the United States).

Once this is registered, as my response in fact emphasizes, and as I have continually emphasized on this blog, I think what we have to realize next is that we cannot even trade on these popular notions in order to defend what Derrida is doing: that is, disparaging someone like Sokal doesn't do much. It is akin with the ineffectiveness of Derrida's oft repeated objection to his objectors, "you have not read me." That is, when there is misreading out there, what is needed is an exposition that relies on more general, but more accurate characterizations of what Derrida is up to--not the injunction, addressed to the most visible of opponents, to read more and more, without anything else more to say. The latter maneuver risks keeping the misunderstanding in place in order to let us retreat to our self-satisfied knowledge. Obviously my commentator is in no way making these moves. But he does do something else which I would like to resist, and which might link up with these strategies that play on the figure of "misunderstood Derrida." This is to imply that if Derrida brings up or even reads something scientific, it somehow counts as addressing science, and this (even if it is, indeed, in small amounts, which my commentator rightly acknowledges) combats the misunderstanding. My position will be clear from what I say:

It is good to mention the work on François Jacob. This dovetails with the work on Leroi-Gourhan that I mentioned--and there are some more seminars to be published on the topic of life that should make Derrida's interests there clearer, perhaps relating him more to biology. On this theme, there should also be more in these seminars on Nietzsche, who is actually more absent than people might think from the Derridian corpus--though perhaps this is only because of his prolific output, and the fact that his considerations of Nietzsche are already so powerful and interesting. The work on Nietzsche, combined with the recent writings (and seminars) on the animal and Deleuze might make this whole science-related area light up.

But I feel that we have to be clearer here, we can't equivocate. We can't really say that because Derrida occasionally is very interested in one aspect of science (as I'll argue below, agreeing with you, scientificity), and even dips occasionally into scientific discourse, we can count him as really interested in a lot of science, or at least more interested in more of it than the caricatures. While I take the point that he will always be more of whatever the caricatures make him out to be, I'd say that this really is already by definition true, and claim we have to get more precise about what we mean by science and its relation to questions of scientificity.

I think Derrida is interested more in science in terms of its institution, founding, and the policing of its borders--his work on psychoanalysis is a great example of this. I think this is generally pretty plausible--we might indeed all agree that scientificity is actually the main obsession of Derrida. But for me, this means he is precisely not interested in most of science. The occasional dip into data and scientific activity, mixed with his prolonged questioning of institution, doesn't equal what we rightly want from him, which is some way to bring his work into connection most science.

You see I make no real mention here of data, or results--I'm not arguing as an empiricist. I'm just not overusing the power of metonymy.

I'd also say that the Origin of Geometry precisely backs up my point. In that work, the issues there are more detailed, and because they are concerned (rightly) with stressing the (incredible) uniqueness of Husserl's position, on the one hand, and still working out notions of writing, on the other, we get something that is more "internal" to the field, if you like, and can be construed as a detailed analysis of geometry and its scientificity. But I'd wouldn't really consider it like this without significant reservations--I'd say, like the work on Jacob, it is still more interested in institution as more of a general question (which of course bears on each instance of its internal problematic).

Obviously all the terms here, "internal" and "general" are put in question, but I'm pretty adamant about resisting giving into what Derrida does with them here (he's obviously showing scientificity has to bear on each instance "internal" to a field, such that we can't say scientificity is an external, general problem in the sense that I'm using these words--a sense that takes scientificity as somehow prior to the scientific activity of the field), if only because I'm trying to outline another (and I'd argue, more pressing, and in fact the most obsessive) problem he is concerned with, which is the provisionality of his work. Derrida, because he is interested in the problem of institution, becomes less interested in most of science: what we need to do is not act as if he already addressed it in its entire, but take Derrida there using what we have got. This is why I stressed that what he's doing is not at all incompatible with science--and why I lamented he didn't do more with it while he was alive (though the work on Jacob was indeed a very serious consideration).

So while the general popular question of whether Derrida is pro- or anti-science is badly posed, the objection to it is perhaps not adequately outlined either. Though one is right to register how most considerations of Derrida are dishonest, I'd say what this objection that stresses the presence of "scientific" elements in Derrida's texts ends up doing is using Derrida's "obsession," combined with dips into science, to make his work seem like it continually addressed science, like some massive problematic always in the background, when it really didn't. The issue of institutions was such a massive problematic, and it was in fact always right there in the foreground.

In short, what I'm saying is that "science" is a huge term. And indeed one can use this fact to say that Derrida indeed addresses science. But I say what we need to conclude from the wide range of this term is precisely that the occasional dip into science, with a prolonged meditation addressing one aspect of science doesn't mean Derrida addresses even a lot of science. It means his work is specific, it takes a specific turn, and in fact if it doesn't address the majority of science, that's even totally excusable: he was only one man after all! It certainly means that he wasn't hostile to science--but let's not distort what he did in order to counter some inane "popular" objection. We need more objections to whatever misunderstanding are out there put in terms of what Derrida indeed didn't do, is all I'm saying.

Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, let's not act as if what people want from Derrida when they bring up science is only a consideration of empirical results, even if they are indeed empiricists. Let's not imply that it's the people who want some science for Derrida who are really the wrong ones, because they perhaps have a real limited view of what science actually is. This seems to trade on a misunderstanding of "empiricism" which is even greater than whatever misunderstanding of Derrida is out there. One is right to say that Derrida addressed empiricism in Of Grammatology (and I'm going to do a very close reading of this in a couple days--look out). But I'd argue that this doesn't mean he thereby participates in any way in the "empiricism" mentioned here--which is, given this notion of "empiricism," a good thing. What he says might then have a real future with real empiricism. But more than that, it might have a future with science--since he's not hostile to it at all--a science which is, indeed because of its actual empiricism in certain parts, and the methods as well as practices that emerge around its empiricist core, not just reducible to an uncomplicated, flat, undifferentiated "empiricism."

...So ends my response, but I'll elaborate on one last thing. One can also critique empiricism and not be anti-science. Derrida in fact does this many times, and I don't fault him for it--since it realizes science is such a wide, varying field. Empiricism and especially positivism are very particular things, and Derrrida has very particular objections to each of them. He also has, as was mentioned, very particular arguments in support of the former in Of Grammatology, which wouldn't merely reduce to the proposition that it can be, at times "more radical" than transcendentalism. If everything was judged on the basis of whether it was more or less radical (a word Derrida himself finds puzzling and calls into question in Rogues), as it seems to do at this juncture in critical theory, cultural criticism, and philosophy, we'd find that many things were probably more radical than we expect. But this is what is really being advocated in such a defense of empiricism by way of its "radicality," is it not? That it is only good insofar as it shakes up the metaphysical tradition, and surprises us? Deleuze borders on such a position, as I read him. But such a position might better look to Comte in the first place, who made the dissolution of metaphysics through positivism his very mission, way back in the mid-19th century. Or structuralism (to stay in France), that adventure most "radical" thinkers still disparage quite openly, and which promised--as its very mission--to dissolve philosophy into anthropology and install that within the "sciences of man." It is in fact, against this dissolution that Derrida, continually wrote and in fact worked (that is, in the institutions he was a part of and, eventually, directed)--which is often completely lost on Anglo-American audiences (who are scandalized that Bourdieu can reveal such a radical was really trying to preserve philosophy!). Why are we so suprised that deconstruction, which strives always to resist mere destruction, would insist on the need to reconsider any assured notion of what is "radical," especially if it is used as a measure--doesn't such a measure precisely stabilize radicality? That is, not in order to use it strategically, but to flatten it into what is dismissible in advance?

Scholarly experience

Bourdieu is making the following case for "the indispensable creativity of empirical research," which (and I couldn't have put it better) is the fact that "when we act without entirely knowing what we are doing, we make it possible to discover in what we have done something of which we were previously unaware" (Homo Academicus, 7--in this he might agree with Deleuze). He then says this, which I think is just so excellent:

Far from being, as certain "initiatory" representatives of the "epistemological break" would have us believe, a sort of simultaneously inaugural and terminal act [my italics, mj], the renunciation of first-hand intuition is the end product of a long dialectical process [again mine, mj] in which intuition, formulated in an empirical operation, analyzes and verifies or falsifies itself, engendering new hypotheses, gradually more firmly based, which will be transcended in their turn, thanks to the problems, failures, and expectations which they bring to light.
-Homo Academicus, 7

But then, in a footnote to this sentence, he talks of the activity of managing of this process introducing a difference between scholarly and ordinary experience--which just takes the cake:

I cannot regret strongly enough not having kept a research diary which would have shown, better than any declaration, the role of empirical work in the progressive accomplishment of the break with first-hand experience. But a reading of the list of sources used (see appendix 1 [which is not just extensive, but also highly organized]) should at least give an idea of the work of controlled recollection which is the motivating difference between ordinary experience and scholarly experience.
-Homo Academicus, 280

This work is also what precisely makes scholarly experience necessary to analyze qua different.

Methodology of literary study and literary theory

Can we extract, from a multifarious set of discourses, a literary critical methodology, or a methodology of literary study, and oppose this to literary theory?

I think we can, though I'm still just working out this idea--in other words, though what we extract can only, as of yet, be a theory (a literary theory) of this study of method. However, we should have no qualms about this: it is precisely the job of literary theory to theorize about such things (things that may oppose it), since theory itself is nothing that should be overcome, over with, etc., however tired we become of it. Perhaps, indeed, it is nothing that can be overcome (and that's a theory right there, Paul de Man's). Literary theory (we may elaborate on de Man's thesis) speculates on its demise, constantly being hindered by the possibility that this demise is impossible.

What, though, would we now extract? In other words, what do we mean by "methodology?" The particular practices, attitudes, moves, approaches of literary study at particular moments in its history, as well as at particular sites in the wide spread of its deployment. In short, it would be the formalization of the way in which we usually talk about certain ways to study literature, just before we begin trying to ask ourselves what these ways of study presuppose about the literary object or the task of criticism: we might say Geoffrey Hartman in Wordsworth's Poetry is very sensitive to the historical import of a psychology, for example, and that Walter Benjamin in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels was obviously under the pressures of writing something that could be academically accepted. These are ways of talking about how studies of literature work that are as of yet impressionistic, aesthetic, biographical, or organized around a sort of study of influences or crude history of ideas. But what is in question in them are ways a study of literature actually proceeds, its texture, its general approach, its particular form of responsiveness. What makes them particularly special, however, is that what is accounted for is not a general set of formal presuppositions, but (almost like a stylistics, but concerned also with function and aim) a discrete set of critical operations: transitions, modes of citation, the structuring of a study, its local strategies, its momentary deployments of rhetoric (which may indeed be material, everyday practices, actions outside of the text proper). When we talk about the toning down of Benjamin's aphoristic tendencies in the light of how he was trying to submit Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as his Habilitationschrift (that is, as George Steiner nicely talks about him in his introduction to the Verso edition) this is oddly particular: it is a statement indifferent to the limits of Benjamin's way of working, but sketches the positive features of that way in terms of practical (that is, limited) limits. It is focused on method.

I need a better example, but for now I can also give some depth to the notion of a literary critical methodology by putting it in relation to literary theory--which is not necessarily always implied in this way of talking, but, unopposed by any other way of talking about these phenomena, these practices, continually exerts pressure upon this area of discourse and lifts it into the sphere of theory (in short, colonizes it). A methodologist would get at all those things a theorist talks about and then turns into a theory: a set of general, almost a priori theses about the role of literature and the role of literary study, which must be overcome or opposed by another theory, another set of theses. In Paul de Man's terms, methodology would be somewhat like the study of reading (de Man would just say, reading itself--that is what makes him a theorist and not a methodologist), which is something prior to theory but which also, at times, interrupts theory. And indeed, here too is a good example of precisely what I mean: what we are doing here is not only outlining what methodology is, but actually defining the procedures of literary theory as a counterexample. In doing this, what we construct, following but also revising de Man, is a description of the method of literary theory: it is characterized here--I claim--by an operation of generalizing, or perhaps overgeneralizing (that is, by totalizing). I do this, I construct this description, before I call it into question, and insofar as I am doing this, my gaze is on theory as method, as a general practical approach with specific ramifications (I can think of specific texts where this generalization is most clear--indeed, in very crucial sites in de Man's work, but to get into this would take us too far astray) and, most of all, specific moves or functions (as an aside, one of my points here is that the increasing use of this word "move," the surprising extent of its acceptance, can be traced to an attempt to get at this level of method, particularly with respect to theoretical arguments, and I think is proof we're already talking on a methodological level--and that talking on a theoretical level about these things is inadequate). In short, I'm not focused here on theory as theory, but theory as a method.

The task somewhat defined, we encounter objections. First, the object of such a methodology would not be literature, but literary study. So what is the pertinence of such a discourse for the study of literature specifically? What distinguishes it from institutional history?

This objection presupposes that the study of literature is itself not a particularly remarkable discourse, as if its remarkable thickness (its proliferation) were merely the excrescence, the remainder of a more primary sphere of artistic production (as if it were merely "secondary texts" compared to "primary texts"). I would reply as follows. While I think it has the sort of analytical function that is similar to that of science, in that it possesses an object and studies that object--and indeed I believe it should retain that function, that homology to science, rather than proceed as if it did not establish knowledge, as if it itself were art--the study of literature has a specificity that increases the more and more it becomes distinct from the consumption of texts and indeed, the mere interpretation of them. In short, it can less and less be defined in terms of its object. (And as we can see from recent histories of science, we find that this does not mean the study of literature is therefore different from science, as if science had a clear object and literary studies, or the humanities more generally, did not: indeed, precisely like certain sciences, it cannot be defined merely in terms of its object.) Because on the one hand the study of literature at least since the advent of theory establishes this distinction more concretely (in short, because we are working to define ourselves less by our object), and on the other because literary study, or the type of study that we now call the study of literature--perhaps including aspects of rhetoric, exegesis, or the study of language generally--has a long history of refusing to simply perform either of these functions (that is, because literary study was never defined by its object in the first place), this specificity is quite high. It seems clear then that a certain distinctiveness which demands its own type of study would inhere in the practice of criticism; a literary critical methodology would be that type of study.

We run the risk in claiming this, however, that we might just be entrenching more and more the notion that literary study is just the study of a literary object. That is, another objection to our rebuttal lies in wait: we could only give some specificity to the study of literature itself at this point in our analysis of it, when the literary study is indeed extremely confident that it has an object. We would then be taking the existence of the object for granted, and would merely create a new object existing beside it (the object would be the analysis of the first object). In short, we cannot just posit that the existence of a certain specificity of literary study merits treating it as an autonomous sphere. We cannot confuse specificity with autonomy (it might indeed be the case that with greater specificity there is less autonomy when it comes to literary study). We cannot shirk from the task of actually establishing its relationship to literature, thereby making literary critical methodology somehow pertinent to literature itself.

I get into this confusing territory here because many of the attempts to talk about the way the study of literature proceeds--in other words, attempts to talk about its method--refuse to do this. Two discourses are set up: that of literature, and that of literary study, both having very clear (though very, very different) institutional ties. (Very bad) Marxist criticism and Foucauldian criticism sometimes do this: the assumption is that you can have, say, a depiction of the institutions of power within a novel, or, still staying within the realm of the literary, a certain circulation of a literary document in the marketplace, while you also have a certain set of critics who, years later, have ties to the university and circulate their studies of literature in that (separate) institution. The lines are not always so clear, however, and more of these Marxist and Foucauldian studies assume the existence of two discourses without actually stating anything about them: they are implied in certain gestures (again we see the benefit of looking at method) whose purpose is to call into question the position from which a critic is speaking of a particular work. In short, rather than clearly establishing the relationship of two different discourses to each other, it is more advantageous for a particular type of criticism (and again, it is usually naive, or very bad) to say that they are in fact totally related at particular times, and then at other times say that they are different, incommensurate.

Pierre Bourdieu resolves these problems when it comes to the sphere of literature and literary criticism, and thereby comes the closest to performing the sort of study of critical method that we are advocating. At the heart of his project is an effort to show that the study of literature and the production of literature are two aspects of one process, which can also still be differentiated across a wide continuum in a nuanced way. In short, he makes the distinction we are making between literary production and the study of literature, but he also establishes a relationship between the two. In doing so, he also accomplishes what we seek to accomplish: the destruction of the notion that the study of literature is the same thing as the study of a literary object. He sees in this notion not only all that we have remarked above about the problems of supposing the literary study is a secondary text appended to a primary text (that is, unlike many theorists in the 70's/80's, he does not invert the old paradigm and assert that literary commentary may indeed be literature--cf. Geoffrey Hartman's famous essay, in Criticism in the Wilderness), but also sees a certain notion of art itself bound up with it. We can call it the aesthetic consideration of art, or, perhaps better, the Kantian notion: the literary critical act is, in this view, nothing more than a very sophisticated response to the work. Even when it tries to be rigorous, to be scientific, it comments upon literature as if it were an entity existing over against a subjectivity that experiences it: the task of the critic, then, is to be as true to the experience of the literature insofar as it corresponds to the nature of the text (to what is "in" it). Of course, you can deviate from this model, but still retain the aesthetic function, the Kantian standpoint: most notably, you can grant some autonomy to the act of responsiveness itself, and no longer demand that literary criticism concern itself with the amount of correspondence between what is said about a text and what is actually in it. But this approach may still reasonably suppose that literary criticism has a privileged view upon the object, for example, such that it can nevertheless still say things about what is actually present in a text. This is indeed reasonable, but it is also still Kantian, still aesthetic: as de Man puts it, it presupposes a type of phenomenality exists in the literary object which allows a critic (as opposed to someone else) to say such things, to suppose that, even if he is not concerned with how his statements correspond to the text, or whether they are true of it, might still actually say something about a text.

What Bourdieu does to rid us of this notion, of this function of criticism, is to situate it, as we said, on one and the same plane with literature itself. Literary criticism then can be seen as a particular activity that indeed has a relationship to literary production--the production of texts. But it is an activity that stands alongside other activities, like the process of book distribution, marketing, reviews, all of which now are seen as differentiated, distinct ways of handling (I emphasize this word, since it retains a nice Heideggerian valence) literary production, indeed as modes of production in their own right, as opposed to a homogeneous set of responses to the text. Institutions also are part of this network (as it were), but again exist only beside other practices of handling literature: they do not, as in Foucault, gain a sort of autonomy except insofar as they work against the other practices to achieve the effect of autonomy, the appearance of it (this is why Bourdieu's critiques of institutions are much more rigorous, something which the work of my buddy Evan, in a paper given at the UCLA Southland Graduate Student Conference recently made clear).

We can now return to the project of a methodology of literary study: Bourdieu resolves the problems that arise when one begins to posit some specificity to the literary critical task, when one begins to separate the study of literature apart from the production of literature itself, but it is not clear that positing such a separation would immediately restore the Kantian, aesthetic status of literary criticism. To put it a different way, Bourdieu's way of working is only perhaps one solution, not the solution to the Kantian problem. Indeed, once you begin to see the force of putting things on one plane, as it were, or seeing them (in his terminology) in terms of a field, it becomes hard to then study isolated elements of that field, in the way that we are proposing literary study should itself be studied in terms of its method. For it is (rightly) not obvious why you would then look at one point as opposed to another, or, better, without also considering all the others (you feel, again rightly, as if you are falling back into the old illusions). And while indeed I believe with Bourdieu that it makes little sense to see literary criticism without also looking at literary reviews, say (or at least looking at where it comes from--i.e. the academy), we might still be able to keep a focus on this area which would not immediately land us back into the old aesthetic problems, or for that matter unknowingly perpetuate them.

All this is to say that there are, I think, reasons for talking about literary study (and specifically its methods) apart from literature which, on the one hand, don't have to presume literary criticism is autonomous or, on the other, don't have to assume the totality of a field as the object proper to a study. We can have at the same time a wider and a narrower object. Part of this comes from a view of the way in which literary criticism proceeds that is very similar to Bourdieu's: a study of literary critical methodology would see literary criticism as a set of approaches, as a set of operations (some textual, some institutional, some habitual), which are not too distinct from the practices that he thinks ultimately make up the field (by inserting themselves in it). Thus our resistance to talking about certain aspects of literary study as theory is not entirely negative: it is grounded in a more positive account of activity that is basically that of Bourdieu's, which refuses to see them--as many theorists do--in the abstract realm of ideas, of competing thoughts.

There are other objections, I'm sure--particularly from those who might indeed defend this sphere of thought apart from action, who would like to see literary criticism not as a set of actions but as a form of thinking--but the one concerning the merits of treating literary criticism itself as the material for study is the most important, and I have treated it accordingly at length. What remains to be articulated is more of what such a study--such a methodology--would relate to literature itself if it is not entirely going to do so as Bourdieu says. For now, let us just say that without supposing literature is destined to be interpreted or studied critically (which is another way, as we saw, of conceiving literature and literary criticism aesthetically), the operations of literary criticism are indeed important in that they tend to bear also upon modes of reading, which are themselves essential--though not always--to literary production. I'd have to think more about what this means, and whether it isn't just putting everything in different (though no doubt, better) words. The fact that literary criticism also deals so much with language--both its nature and, more often, with its use--indeed brings its contributions to reading out of the sphere of mere reflections on consumption.

I do think though that formalizing the way we talk about the way literary study proceeds would, however, be highly profitable--it might have enough amazing results on its own. This, I'll maintain, would require us to talk about methods instead of theories, or at least begin to differentiate between the two more. On the other side of the spectrum, we would also have to differentiate more between basic activities in life (like Benjamin composing for the academy), and the specific practices that make up literary criticism: there are not styles of criticism, or greater or lesser sensitivities to texts, or unique approaches, but specific methods of literary criticism.

Practical criticism and the sociologist

I just love Raymond Williams. Here's his description of Lucian Goldmann confronting literary scholars at Cambridge, and then his short history of the problems of practical criticism--with Leavis as (and I think he's right about this) the villain:

...I would give it about fifteen minutes, as Goldmann began to describe his own methodology, for that crushing quotation to be brought out from Lawrence:‘We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.’ So no methodology here, thank you; only sincere and vital emotion. But who decides the sincerity and vitality? If you need to ask that you couldn’t begin to understand the answer. People decide it, in themselves and in an active and collaborative critical process.
But which people, in what social relationships, with each other and with others? That, at whatever risk of damnation, is the necessary question of the sociologist. Practical criticism is vulnerable at several points: in its hardening into an apparently objective method which is based, even defiantly, on subjective principles; in its isolation of texts from contexts; in its contemplative aspects, which have often made it hostile to new literary work. But all these weaknesses are most apparent, we say, when it is badly done: well or badly being again an internal criterion. In fact, however, all these weaknesses, or potential weaknesses, follow from the specific social situation of its practitioners. The real answer to that question—which people, in what social relationships?—was, as we all know, precise and even principled: the informed critical minority. What began as the most general kind of claim, a visibly human process centred on the apparently absolute qualities of sincerity and vitality, ended, under real pressures, as a self-defining group. But then, because the critical activity was real, very different social relations—a sense of isolation from the main currents of a civilisation in which sincerity and vitality were being limited or destroyed, an implacable opposition to all the agents of this limitation or destruction—emerged and forced a generalization of the original position.
-"Literature and Sociology," Culture and Materialism, 17-18 (and here at the New Left Review).

It is on the basis of this history that he proceeds to, very clearly, put the problem to the sociologist: in Britain--but I wonder whether this has some similar significance here in America now--one has to confront the fact that "it is from this," this practical criticism, "paradoxically, that much of the English work in literary sociology has come" (18). In other words, literary sociology must also transform the academic society (which is not the same, for Williams, as the discipline or institution) in order to be able to do its work. This does not mean revolution--which the theorists here in the 80's tried to bring about--but first and foremost a change in vocabulary that will allow method and theory to enter into critical practice (as I tried to bring out of Williams in the last post). First and foremost, there is the change in what actually gets described: not the actual but the possible. Using Goldmann, he outlines this view:

Most sociology of literature, Goldmann then argues, is concerned with the relatively apparent relations between ordinary literature and actual consciousness: relations which show themselves at the level of content, or in conventional elaboration of its common illusions. The new sociology of literature—that of genetic structuralism—will be concerned with the more fundamental relations of possible consciousness, for it is at the centre of his case that the greatest literary works are precisely those which realize a world-view at its most coherent and most adequate, its highest possible level. We should not then mainly study peripheral relations: correspondences of content and background; overt social relations between writers and readers. We should study, in the greatest literature, the organizing categories, the essential structures, which give such works their unity, their specific aesthetic character, their strictly literary quality; and which at the same time reveal to us the maximum possible consciousness of the social group—in real terms, the social class—which finally created them, in and through their individual authors.
-"Literature and Sociology," 23-24.

Ultimately, however (and a bit against Goldmann), Williams says that we cannot even think of what gets realized and revealed to the sociologist as a consciousness: first and foremost, "we need to reconsider the idea of consciousness itself" (24). Rather, what is more important is the ability of the structure, the organizing categories, to then actualize themselves. Where are the points in this structure that are more capable of producing the work than others? This is why he introduces his notion of "structures of feeling:" by making the structure one of feeling (which, as I always stress, should almost be taken in the tactile sense of "feeling:" what we are talking about here is bodily, material), what one does is then think more in terms of the structure and sees its productive possibilities not at all in terms of the actual. One thinks the ideality of the structure in a more differentiated way (one thinks its productive capacity more purely) by attributing to it this odd (and not necessarily conscious) aspect of "feeling." One adds to it a certain width, a breadth, not unlike Bourdieu.