Marxism and Deconstruction: Symposium at the Conference on Contemporary Genre Theory and the Yale School, 1 June 1984

Abstract

The Symposium at the Conference on Contemporary Genre Theory and the Yale School took place on June 1, 1984, at the Center for Continuing Education on the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman. Panelists Barbara Johnson, Louis Mackey and J. Hillis Miller fielded questions for two hours from about one hundred students and scholars who had gathered to hear their remarks. Scheduled for the last day of the Conference, the Symposium gave the students an opportunity to raise questions and engage the panelists in a dialogue while allowing the panelists to respond to other papers given at the conference and to clarify or expand on their own presentations. The dynamics of this session, the clash of viewpoints and the theoretical, philosophical and political differences which emerged from this discussion made the Symposium one of the most stimulating events of the Conference.The Symposium had not been designed by the conference organizers to address as exclusively as it did the question of the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction. The discussion in the Symposium arose out of what was generally felt to be the unfortunate omission of Marxist viewpoints from the conference schedule. Specifically, the impetus arose from a presentation by David Gross during the session on Drama and Contemporary Theory on “Brecht and Modern Theory.” Gross uses Brecht's poem “A Worker Reads History” as an illustration of the critical/skeptical attitude toward the act of reading (history)—an example of Brecht's strategy of “estrangement” and Marx's “relentless criticism of everything existing,” which seems in significant ways like a deconstructive reading. Gross concluded his presentation with a challenge that deconstruction address economic, social and political institutions much more explicitly.During the Symposium Barbara Johnson focused on the ways in which both deconstruction and Marxism decenter the subject in a critique of the bourgeois notion of identity and selfhood. Responding to Johnson, Louis Mackey commented on the possibility of rapprochement between these two theories. (Mackey presented a deconstructive reading of St. Anselm's Proslogium at the conference.) The result was an exploratory foray into the differences between a critique and a political action, both of which center around the subversion of authority.What emerged was a discussion of the relationship between linguistic and social/historical modes of analysis in current literary theory. As forms of literary criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism have brought about a revolution in critical theory. Focusing on the conditions of signification, structuralist theories examine the sign and ways in which the sign produces meaning. Deconstruction subverts the structuralist enterprise, taking the analysis deeper into language, philosophically and historically analyzing the basic assumptions of Western culture and how these assumptions affect the way we use language. The result is a literary criticism which has extraliterary implications. As Barbara Johnson noted during the Symposium, deconstruction is “an attack on the way in which discourse functions in patterns of domination.” This attack is also relentlessly self-critical in its examination of the hierarchies which perpetuate repression in Western culture—an examination that deconstruction shares with Marxism. Traditional Marxist concern for the structures of economic and political life has expanded in the hands of literary Marxists to include a broad range of cultural and critical activities in which structuralism and post-structuralism have had a significant impact. Like deconstruction, Marxism is also concerned with the ways in which discourse functions in patterns of political effacement and domination.In practice, however, linguistic theories have tended to ignore history while social/historical approaches have often systematically ignored language. Can Marxism and deconstruction rescue each other from the blindnesses of each approach? ls there a way of combining Marxism and deconstruction that remains loyal to both? Do Marxism and deconstruction share structural similarities as modes of analysis? Will any combining of the two necessarily privilege one over the other? This symposium represents an inquiry into just this area where these two critical theories both overlap and fail to meet.In the discussion which follows, each of the panelists fuses theory and practice in unique ways. The transcription does, on the whole, retain the original wordings of the questions and the responses from the panelists. We have made changes only when necessary to impose grammatical and syntactical clarity on the flow of spoken discourse.