Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production

233 Pages·2022·3.233 MB·English

by  Warren Montag, Audrey Wasser

Pierre Macherey
and the Case of
Literary Production

Pierre Macherey
and the Case of
Literary Production
Edited by Warren Montag
and Audrey Wasser
northwestern university press
evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Published 2022 by Northwestern
University Press. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Montag, Warren, editor. | Wasser, Audrey, editor.
Title: Pierre Macherey and the case of literary production / edited by Warren
Montag and Audrey Wasser.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022011420 | ISBN 9780810145115 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780810145122 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810145139 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Macherey, Pierre. | Macherey, Pierre. Pour une théorie de la
production littéraire. | Literature— History and criticism— Theory, etc. |
Literature— Philosophy.
Classification: LCC PN45 .M3173 2022 | DDC 801.95— dc23/eng/20220308
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011420
Contents
Introduction 1
Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser
Postface to A Theory of Literary Production 17
Pierre Macherey
Why Read, Macherey? 29
Audrey Wasser
Spoken and Unspoken 43
Ellen Rooney
Baudelaire’s Shadow: On Poetic Determination 63
Nathan Brown
What Is Materialist Analysis? Pierre Macherey’s
Spinozist Epistemology 87
Nick Nesbitt
Blackness: N’est Pas? 119
David Marriott
What Do We Mean When We Speak of the Surface of a Text?
Reflections on Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production 145
Warren Montag
Reading Althusser 165
Pierre Macherey
Between Literature and Philosophy 179
An Interview with Pierre Macherey by Joseph Serrano
Works by Pierre Macherey 203
Contributors 217
Index 219
Introduction
Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser
The recent publication in English translation of two of Pierre Macherey’s
most important and influential works, his contribution to Reading Capital
(1965, trans. 2015) and Hegel or Spinoza (1979, trans. 2011), has served
to call attention to the power and originality of Macherey’s thought. A
Theory of Literary Production (1966, trans. 1978; reissued 2006), however,
available in translation for more than forty years, remains an unsettled text
that continues to provoke disagreement about its basic positions. Far from
consigning the book to a particular historical moment—s pecifically, the
structuralist moment of the 1960s— its capacity to produce contradictory
readings enabled it to survive this moment, and several others, as if some of
its most important postulates were deferred at the outset, intelligible only
under conditions that did not exist in 1966 or even in 1978. While the publi-
cation of some of Macherey’s most important texts in translation is no more
likely to eliminate the heterogeneous effects of A Theory of Literary Pro-
duction than the appearance in 1990 of his second book on literature, The
Object of Literature (under the title À quoi pense la littérature? Exercises de
philosophie littéraire; trans. 1995), these texts taken together help clarify its
arguments and, in doing so, distinguish the conflicts proper to it from those
projected on it.
Another source of the ambiguity surrounding Macherey’s first book for
English- language readers is the lack of a comprehensive account of the theo-
retical conjuncture in which Macherey wrote (beyond vague notions of a
structuralist or structural Marxist moment). Without understanding the
stakes and objectives of what Macherey conceived as an intervention, English-
language critics, commentators, and those who simply applied something of
what Macherey wrote systematically overlooked essential aspects of his proj-
ect and misread others. In part, this may be explained by the twelve- year
gap between the publication of the French original in 1966 and its English
translation in 1978. The interest elicited by the appearance of Althusser’s
For Marx and Reading Capital in English in 1969, and the collection of
articles (including several on art and literature) published as Lenin and Phi-
losophy in 1971, led readers who sought an “Althusserian” literary criticism
1
2 Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser
to Macherey’s text, which was originally published in Althusser’s Théorie
series. In the absence of an English translation, Terry Eagleton’s presentation
of Macherey’s text in Criticism and Ideology (1976) took on an unusual
importance and continued to shape the reception of Macherey’s work long
after it was translated, in part because of this work’s conceptual and stylis-
tic density, the difficulties of which Macherey himself later acknowledged.
Eagleton’s account of Macherey is itself a revealing exercise in philosophical
and theoretical translation: it captures and often enlivens some of Macherey’s
most important theses (above all, those involving criticism as judgment) and,
at the same time, blocks the apprehension of others (the entire constellation
of theses mobilized to articulate the critique of interpretation).
Fredric Jameson also played a role in shaping what was visible of Mach-
erey’s work in the United States. The opening of The Political Unconscious
(1981) devoted more than twenty-fi ve pages to Althusser and Macherey’s
positions on interpretation, causality, and structure. Some commonalities
between Jameson and Macherey’s practices of reading are certainly worth
noting here— for example, the “limitations” and “strategies of containment”
that Jameson identifies and juxtaposes in his reading of other critics can be
compared to the attention Macherey pays to the décalage exhibited in the lit-
erary work.1 In this way, both thinkers arguably take as their object of study
not an “object” in the traditional sense but a difference, a dislocation, or a
discrepancy. Yet on the whole, Jameson’s work represents a missed encounter
with Macherey’s. Althusser and Macherey’s arguments are folded into what
is broadly characterized as a Nietzschean, antihermeneutic tendency in post-
structural French thought, while their specifically Spinozist commitments are
largely unaddressed, as are Althusser’s arguments about the unevenness of
historical time. Of Macherey in particular, Jameson says very little, preferring
to assimilate Macherey’s position to Althusser’s without recognizing the dis-
agreements that unfolded between the two precisely over the role of literary
interpretation in working out a concept of structure. The latter is represented
by Macherey’s essay “Literary Analysis: The Tomb of Structures” in part 2 of
A Theory of Literary Production.2
Through these early and decontextualized readings, Macherey’s work
nevertheless played an important role in changing some basic assumptions
concerning both the literary text and the act of reading. It often did so, how-
ever, indirectly, that is, in the form of an absent cause. While each decade after
1970 saw an increase in the number of references to Macherey, the effects of
his work were significantly greater than the number of direct citations would
indicate. On the one hand, the critique of normative approaches to literature,
the negative consequences of which were on full display in the debates over
the canon, together with his rejection of the postulate of the formal and
thematic unity of the literary work, helped initiate a transformation of the
very concepts of literature and the literary text. This critique allowed read-
ers to look for the historicity of literary works, not in their relation to the
Introduction 3
world outside of them, but internally, immanent in both their form and their
content, that is, in the impossibility of the coherence and consistency of these
latter— an approach that in turn necessitated a decentering and reconceptu-
alization of the very idea of the author, whose role as creator and proprietor
had served as one of the most important guarantees of the ultimate unity of
the work. This coincided with, but was not the same as, the transformations
of basic concepts of literary studies wrought by early receptions of decon-
struction and “la nouvelle critique.”
On the other hand, Macherey’s approach to the questions posed by lit-
erature remained only partially intelligible to readers. Readers of the English
translation expected, and thought Macherey had provided, a more or less
finished theory of literary production, when in fact the entire first, theoreti-
cal, section of the book is devoted to the more modest task of identifying and
dismantling what Macherey called the illusions (rendered in English as “fal-
lacies”) that had so far prevented the development of a theory of literature,
or of what he would call in the course of his exposition “literary produc-
tion.” The illusions he identifies all serve in different ways to deny or negate
the complex reality of the literary work and the process of its production.
The constitutive contradictions, conflicts, and discrepancies that every liter-
ary text displays are treated as superficial or inessential, whether as a puzzle
needing only to be reassembled in its proper order or as mere surface phe-
nomena, functions of the work’s deep structure. In some cases, the unity of
the text is restored with a reference to its origin in the mind of an author, or
to the coherence of its historical moment. These approaches, despite the sig-
nificant differences between them, share a conception of reading as an act of
reduction. In one case, that to which texts must be reduced to be understood
is internal to them, the essence to be recovered from the excrescence that
surrounds it; in the other case, their meaning is contained in their external,
spatiotemporal origin. Perhaps the most influential of Macherey’s analyses
was his account of the normative illusion, the act of judging works accord-
ing to the degree of their deviation from a norm or ideal external to them.
Criticism of this type tells us what a work is not and what it lacks in relation
to an ideal invented by criticism. The positivity of the work is irrelevant to
judgment whose concern is to apply an aesthetic legality (whose effects are
not limited to the realm of literature) to decide whether a work has obeyed
or violated its letter and spirit.
Macherey’s insistence on the constitutive discrepancies of the literary text
is a way of underscoring the text’s irreducible materiality. And this attention
to materiality necessarily extends to literary criticism itself. An analysis of
the ways criticism denies the material existence of literature cannot in turn
deny the material existence of the illusions that govern the practice of read-
ing: to do so would mean simply inventing a new set of illusions to add to
the old. Macherey’s illusions, however, are neither pathologies of a perceiv-
ing subject nor insubstantial apparitions that will disappear in the light of