Date:         Thu, 21 Jul 94 09:37:43 EDT
From: Adrian Kelly <3AMK6-AT-QUCDN.QueensU.CA>
Subject:      intro, remarks, requests


     Hi.  I've been lurking for a while, wary of the possibility that I may
have little to contribute to the current debates due to my woefully
inadequate knowledge of 'orthodox' or 'classic' Marxism.  I have been slow
to come around to Marxism (at least as a methodological ally),  stepping in
through the side door of literary-cultural theory (Fredric Jameson, R.
Williams, Terry Eagleton, and of course Lukacs) and some recent study of
the Frankfurt School which fostered an ongoing interest in Marxist-psycho-
analytic theory (Deleuze and Guattari primarily). This research forms the
theoretical core of my doctoral dissertation which, through a comparative
reading of the contemporary American novelist Thomas Pynchon and the South
African writer J.M.Coetzee, examines inter-relationships between war,
imperialism, sexuality, and technology.  I also compare the poetics of
resistance which each writer develops against this complex of forces (which
I suppose form a rough quadrilateral map of the main mechanisms of social
regulation), which leads me into a re-examination of literature's place,
function, use, practical value within a mushrooming technical super-
structure that gladly promotes literature's exchange value while minimizing
its use value etc.
    This brings me back to the recent debates on dialectics, and art's
place within dialectical process.  I am currently trying to work through
Marcuse's thoughts on literature (which seem to me anticipate Jameson's
The Political Unconscious) in E &C and ODM, where he argues that literature,
if it is crtical, oppositional, can work -only- by negation, ie, only by
re-affirming that which it criticizes and pretends to offer an imaginative
alternative to. This applies especially to mimetic forms and genres which
are kinds of social contracts formed within existing captialist-bourgeouis
social relations, and act as a kind of cap or governing super-ego of a text's
oppostional content.  To Marcuse it is only non-conventinal forms such as
surrealism which offer any hope of imaginative transformation, ie,it seems,
that can be properly dialectical in that they do not work by mere negation.
(In ODM, however, Marcuse does suggest that it may not be possible to write
in a non-reified language).  Marcuse's comments seem to anticipate the
advent of postmodern literature.   Both Pynchon and Coetzee are generally
regarded as 'postmodern' in style and in politics, although the politics of
postmodernism is a particularly gruesome can of worms which I don't want to
open at the moment except to say that Marxist literary critics certainly do
-not- regard postmodernism positively; to crudely sum up Jameson, pomo is a
commodified, reified, spectacular aesthetic divested of any truly oppostional
potential (the emptying out of historical-dialectical process?).  I do not
-want- to agree with Jameson, but this is largely due to a persistent faith in
the potential of imaginative literature, and what I think is the actuality of
'non-reified' form (if there can truly be such a thing) to be found in P and C
and others like them (ecriture feminine for example), a form which does seem to
be 'dialectical' in that it contains the opposing term, recognizes its
complicity within and dependence upon it as a predicate of evolution.  This
itself is debatable in that P and C also seem to me at times to abjure
dialectical thinking as symptomatic of merely an imaginative reconciliation
of opposites that paralyzes social critique.
    My apologies for some self-indulgent rambling, but I hope that those of
you more fluent with Marxism than I may offer some suggestions, your views
on the transformative potentials of art, art and the dialectical process,
the potentialities of marxist-psychoanalytic discourse  (something from which
I digressed above, but which really interests me at the moment, ie the
writing of desire, the poetics of embodiment, etc) and so on.
Thanks,
Adrian Kelly


     ------------------