Literature and Social Action: Reflections on the Reflection Theory of Literary Art

Abstract

rT Z o RAISE THE QUESTION of the relation between and action is to ask about the ways in which all aspects of the literary world-production, product, exchange, and consumption-relate to that larger structure which, since the eighteenth century in the West, has come to be called society. We are not, I submit, clear about the precise nature of this society. Indeed, the sciences were constituted in their specifically modern form in order to deal with the problem of identifying what might count as a uniquely act. Political economic religious and so on, are all manifestly different kinds of actions; but wherein their shared sociality consists is unclear. Differences over the nature of this pervasive sociality account for the different notions of what a proper science should be. Obviously, a action is any action involving exchange between two or more human beings under conditions of some sort of mutuality of interest, intention, or need. But beyond this basic agreement on the exchange nature of the act, very little else can be said without lapsing into ideological argument. It follows that any effort to determine the status of literary work as a kind of social action, as an effect of causes, or as a reflection of structures, conditions, etc., will be tinged by ideological special pleading-ideological in the degree to which one must presuppose a specific answer to the question What is the nature of society? before proceeding to establish the ways in which literature is related to a given formation. It might be noted as well that if the concept of the underlies all debate among different kinds of theorists, the concept of literature is not less contested among theorists of literature. Here, too, in order to enable investigation, it is necessary simply to assume that one knows what consists of, wherein it differs from language in general on the one side, and discourse specifically on the other, in order to inquire into a given literary work's relationship to the various milieus in which it arose and in which it finds its