Formalism and Marxism (New Accents)

New Accents

by Tony Bennett

First published in 1979. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Genres: Theory, Politics, Nonfiction, Art, Criticism, Philosophy

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Tony Bennett is an English academic who has also worked in Australia. Bennett is an important figure in the development of the Australian approach to cultural studies known as "cultural policy studies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Be...


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Reviews

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

80s theory books are very small and cute. this one made me really want to read bakhtin, and really not want to read althusser. it is very good on the tiresome essentializing of literature and aesthetic categories present even in lots of marxist writing.

[◼️◼️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bennett criticizes the failures of Marxist criticism to break away theoretically from the idealist traditions of bourgeois aesthetics. By providing new answers to the same old questions of aesthetics rather than posing a new problematic unique to the concerns of Marxism, its theorists have failed to ground much of the criticism it has produced in historical materialism. An example of this would be the various attempts at a Marxist theory of literature. Any attempt at a Marxist definition of literature is bound to be idealist, for, as Macherey argues, to ask what literature is is to pose a false question:

Because it is a question which already contains an answer. It implies that literature is something, that literature exists as a thing, as an eternal and unchangeable thing with an essence. (qtd in Bennett 144)

Althusser conceives of ideology as an eternal, epistemological structure to which art—characterized by its function to decenter ideology—is defined relationally, and as such, his definition is already necessarily built on shaky ground.

A valuable insight of Russian Formalism is its insistence on the text as a signification of reality, rather than its reflection, in contradistinction to proponents of Reflection Theory popular among Marxists of the 1920s. The Formalists thus similarly analyzed the literary text in terms of its function to transform habituated ways of cognition; just as the Althusserians identified the 'aesthetic effect' as the disruption of ideology's imposition of imaginary relationships to reality, the Formalists emphasized a text's literariness as its ability to defamiliarize recognition.

A text's ability to fulfill these functions is not merely determined within its own formal composition, but also beyond the text itself. To speak of a text's literariness is to allude to its changing intertextual relations within any given literary system; to study a text's relationship to ideology is to position it against the particular ideologies that contextualize its production and reproduction. What logically follows is an argument against the metaphysic of the text; texts do not contain any privileged, 'true' meaning or value; even its ability to fulfill certain functions necessarily vary at different historical points. Various schools of literary criticism have fallen into the trap of assuming the metaphysic, although they disagree invariably as to where it might be located.

Criticism's object, Bennett argues, shouldn't be the text itself (which arguably doesn't exist), but rather, the varying, concrete, and historically specific functions and effects attributed to the text by material, historical, and ideological determinations at different points in its ever-recurring production and reproduction. "If production is completed only with consumption, then, so far as literary texts are concerned, their production is never completed" (146). Almost paradoxically, the act of criticism itself belongs to that set of determinations that assign value to and mobilize texts in various ways. It is in this sense that criticism might be understood as both a productive and political activity.

To further elaborate on the role of criticism proposed by Bennett, let me end with this quote:

'The philosophers,' Marx wrote, 'have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point is to change it.' Marxist critics, it might similarly be argued, have merely interpreted literature in various ways. The point is to change it, to so work upon those determinations which condition the real social functioning of the literary text as to change the uses to which it is put. (179)

[Mike Mena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Puts the Russian Formalists in conversation with particular Marxists, particularly Althusser. Perhaps my favorite part was the elucidation of Althussian theory--its strengths and weaknesses.

[A L]

A great primer, and, sadly, still relevant.