Literature and Cultural Production PDF

3 Literature and cultural production Telling stories Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, has shown how the war of 1914-18, at the time, was not just presented but experienced through contemporary representations (rumour, myth and liter...

3 Literature and cultural production Telling stories Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, has shown how the war of 1914-18, at the time, was not just presented but experienced through contemporary representations (rumour, myth and literature). The war of 1939-45 was understood at the time mainly through rumour, radio and writing: subsequently it too became myth, figuring, especially, the moment at which we shared the common purpose that consumer-capitalism can only imagine. Harold Wilson, faced with a run on the pound in 1964, told the Labour Party conference: ‘They misjudged our temper after Dunkirk, but we so mobilised our talent and untapped strength that apparent defeat was turned into a great victory. I believe that the spirit of Dunkirk will once again carry us through to success’ (Foot, p. 154). The wartime myth is invoked with the implication that we should forsake allegedly sectional concerns for the politician’s version of the ‘national interest’. However, though the Dunkirk spirit sounds plain, it uses only parts of the story of that British evacuation. It is not so convenient to remember 68, 111 killed, wounded and missing, and the chaos and misunderstanding, with small boats sometimes capsized by panicky men, and order sometimes maintained only at gunpoint (Gates, pp. 115-18). Miliband observes that notions like the Dunkirk spirit call the dead ‘into service once again to help legitimate the regimes for which they have died’ (State, p. 210). It is through such stories, or representations, that we develop understandings of the world and how to live in it. The contest between rival stories produces our notions of reality, and hence our beliefs about what we can and cannot do. That is why governments seek to control what is written and said, especially when rendered insecure by war or some other difficulty. This chapter is about the processes through which we form and change beliefs, and the roles of literature within those processes. The stories through which we make sense of ourselves are everywhere. In the media, they are not just in the articles and programmes labelled ‘fiction’ and ‘drama’, but in those on current affairs, sport, party politics, science, religion, the arts, and those specified as education and for children. They are in the advertisements. At work, the definitions of tasks to be undertaken depend upon them, and the relations between the people involved – some face to face, some very distant. And in our intimate relations there are stories telling us who we are as individuals, who other individuals are and how we relate to them. The conventional division, which I have followed in this paragraph, between the media, work and personal life, is itself one of the most powerful stories. I am not quite sure that ‘story’ is the right term – it sounds rather informal, inconsequential; perhaps ‘narrative’ would be better, but I don’t want its connotations of strategic organization. Carolyn Steedman distinguishes story and history: stories are not consciously ordered, whereas histories (like case studies) are interpretive devices, they suggest a coherence (pp. 138, 143). However, one person’s anecdote is another’s guiding light (as Steedman’s book shows). I use ‘story’ (and ‘representation’) to accommodate the patterns of common sense alongside formal pronouncements, and to avoid prejudging adequacy. In oppositional work this has the advantage of throwing all systems, however authoritative, back to first base so that their claims may be re-evaluated. Stephen Greenblatt approaches the issue by comparing two other ways of regarding reality. On the one hand is a unitary, totalizing vision which claims an explanation for everything prior to experience (he instances psycho-analysis, or one version of it). On the other is the supposed uniqueness of each moment, leading to a stance of relativism, of neutrality (this is prominently represented in existentialism). Rejecting each of these, we are left with ‘a network of lived and narrated stories, practices, strategies, representations, fantasies, negotiations, and exchanges that, along with the surviving aural, tactile, and visual traces, fashion our experiences of the past, of others, and of ourselves’ (Greenblatt, p. 218). This is not to deny individual agency (though it may make it less interesting); rather, the same structure informs individuals and the society. Present action is inconceivable (literally) without the past, but also it enters into multiple new interactions. Structural rules are drawn upon by actors, but through that very action those rules are reconstituted. Anthony Giddens, upon whom I am drawing here, compares the utterance of a grammatical sentence, which presupposes the lexicon and syntactical rules that constitute the language, but is individual and, through its utterance, confirms and modifies the language (pp. 69-71, 77-8). The point to stress here is that stories are lived. They are not just outside ourselves, something we hear or read about. They make sense for us – of us – because we have been and are in them. They are already proceeding when we arrive in the world, and we come to consciousness in their terms. As the world shapes itself around and through us, certain interpretations of experience strike us as plausible because they fit with what we have experienced already. They become common sense, they ‘go without saying’. Colin Sumner explains this as a ‘circle of social reality’: ‘understanding produces its own social reality at the same time as social reality produces its own understanding.’1 For meaning, communication, language work only because they are shared. Even the question ‘What is a chair?’ makes sense only within a system of meanings; otherwise a chair might be a bundle of sticks for making a fire or beating an enemy about the head (Harris, Beliefs, pp. 36-7). If you make up your own language, no one else will understand you; if you persist, you will be thought mad. Meaning is interactive. This is apparent when we observe how people in other cultures than our own make good sense of their world in ways that seem strange to us: their outlook is supported by their social context (Sumner, p. 287). As much as oneself, others have frameworks of perception, maps of meaning, stories, that work in the real world and enable them to complete a circle of social reality. It is hard to challenge the prevailing stories – you will be thought implausible. Powerful stories – those useful to powerful groups – tend to drive out others. The way stories work may be observed at the boundaries of plausibility – the point at which the dominant withholds even a willing suspension of disbelief. Nancy K. Miller remarks the way women writers are accused of falling prey to implausibilities in their fiction. They are said to manifest sensibility, sensitivity, extravagance – ‘code words for feminine in our culture’ – at the expense of verisimilitude.2 Actually, the standards of plausibility are not universal but culturally specific – in this case specific to modern Western patriarchy. That is why some women’s developments of the prevailing stories seem unsatisfactory. Miller argues, further, that the ‘improbable’ plots in novels like La princesse de Clèves (by Mme de Lafayette) and The Mill on the Floss (by George Eliot) may be regarded as comments on the current stories of women’s lives – those inscribed in patriarchal reality. They manifest ‘the extravagant wish for a story that would turn out differently’ (p. 352). The wish of women for power over their lives cannot be expressed plausibly within dominant discourses, only as fantasy. Stories, then, transmit power: they are structured into the social order and the criteria of plausibility define, or seem to define, the scope of feasible political change. Most societies retain their current shape not because subversives are infiltrated, penalized or neutralized, though they are, but because many people believe that things have to take more or less their present form – that they cannot, realistically, be improved upon, at least through the methods to hand. In other words, the prevailing stories are believed to be the most plausible ones; that is why it was effective for Margaret Thatcher to proclaim ‘There is no alternative’. And it is why one recognizes a dominant ideology: were there not such a powerful discourse, people would not acquiesce in the injustice and humiliation that they experience. The power to make your story stick enables you to persuade people to buy your product, or vote for you, or put up with conscription, or unemployment, or stigma.  I have used the idea of ‘telling stories’ partly for its accessibility; a more substantial phrase is cultural production. Societies need to produce, materially, to continue – they need food, shelter, warmth; goods to exchange with other societies, a transport and information infrastructure to carry those processes and so on. Also, they have to produce culturally. They need knowledges to keep material production going – diverse technical skills and wisdoms in agriculture, industury, science, medicine, economics, law, geography, languages, politics and so on. And they need understanding, intuitive and explicit, of a system of social relationships within which the whole process can take place more or less evenly (see Althusser, pp. 123-8). Cultural production produces concepts, systems and apparently ‘natural’ understandings to explain who we are individually and collectively, who the others are, how the world works. This is not to say that the dominant stories are uncontested; on the contrary, they need to be disseminated urgently lest they lose their grip. Social conflict manifests itself as competition between stories. Political change, Terry Eagleton observes, will be coupled with ‘a fierce conflict over signs and meanings, as the newly emergent class strives to wrest the most cherished symbols from the grip of its rivals and redefine them in its own image’ (Rape, p. 2). Before pursuing this thought I shall try to establish the role of literature in cultural production. Literature as a Cultural Apparatus Cultural production occurs all the time; but especially through what C. Wright Mills called the cultural apparatus – ‘all the organisations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on, and by which entertainment and information are produced and distributed’ (p. 552). This includes an elaborate network of formal institutions in the law, education, religion, politics and communications; and also informal networks and conceptual structures (‘the New Right’ as well as the Conservative Party; ‘progressive education’ as well as the school system; ‘the charismatic movement’ as well as the Church of England; ‘the arts’ as well as the Arts Council). It is important to insist on literature as a cultural apparatus because its institutional arrangements are often effaced, for instance in literary criticism, to the point where authors and texts seem to communicate with readers without such mediation (it is interesting that ‘the media’ normally means electronic media). Actually, books reach readers through publishers, reviewers, bookshops and libraries; and the reader’s idea of what she or he is doing is influenced by instruction in schools, literary criticism, arts pages in journals, programmes on radio and television. Richard Ohmann finds, in respect of high-cultural fiction in the United States, that a small group of book buyers formed a screen through which novels passed on their way to commercial success; a handful of agents and editors picked the novels that would compete for the notice of these buyers; and a tight network of advertisers and reviewers, organised around the New York Times Book Review, selected from these a few to be recognised as compelling, important, ‘talked about’.3 Notable changes in cultural direction usually involve both significant texts and institutional developments – the Shakespearean theatre and Hollywood cinema are obvious instances. Samuel Richardson was significant, Terry Eagleton observes, partly because he was a printer as well as a novelist. From this vantage point, he fashioned a whole social apparatus, ‘placing himself at the heart of ethical controversies, education projects, religious and aesthetic contentions’ (Rape, p. 7). In comparable manner, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger signalled a change in English theatre in 1956 in great part because it coincided with and helped to stimulate a new institutional arrangement: subsidized theatre. This not only gave opportunity to plays that might otherwise have been thought uneconomic, it designated certain kinds of theatre ‘serious’ – worth state subsidy, the responsibility of the Arts Council, appropriate for ‘quality’ newspapers, earnest conversation and examination syllabuses (see below, pp. 260-2). ‘Literature’ is another story. Even the concept has been culturally produced: it emerged in the eighteenth century and was not fully developed until the nineteenth century. Eventually it came to mean ‘printed works of a certain quality’ (Williams, R., Marxism, pp. 46-54), and suitable texts were assimilated, retrospectively, to it (as religious icons are put in art galleries). A profession of critical and scholarly experts grew up to support it, and its use in education followed. Michel Foucault points out that ‘the author’ is a function arranged by the culture – a way we have of speaking about texts, of controlling them by ascribing them (Language, pp. 113-38). Usually, in our culture, literature is envisaged as ‘rising above’ its conditions of production and reception; as transcending social and political concerns and other such mundane matters. The argument most often presented for this is that great art has endured the test of time. That is an idealist position; the approach taken in this book is materialist. In my view the ‘art’ of other times and places that we ‘appreciate’ is, ipso facto, that upon which we can gain some kind of purchase from our own time and place, mediated through our particular institutions. We may not notice this because many texts have been so continuously worked upon that they are intertwined with our history, culture and institutions. Conversely, when we no longer admire the ‘art’ valued by earlier generations, we put that down to error, rather than remarking that the concept is inherently relative. We select and assemble ‘art’ to suit current needs, and its ‘enduring relevance’ (which we presumptuously imagine as universality) is thus a circular effect. Literature is an institutional arrangement we have made to dignify some writing (at the expense of other). This is not surprising or sinister: any culture will value some texts more highly than others. But finally we are talking about authority claims. To have your work accepted as art or literature, or to be judged an expert, is to gain a voice in a discourse with certain claims to significance. I have discussed elsewhere how the notion of art as transcending the utilitarian organization of society was fought out during the nineteenth century.4 The romantic claim that artistic and political vision should combine was uncongenial to the developing bourgeois hegemony; it was too dangerous. Instead, poetry found itself with three choices: relegation as trivial; incorporation as a vehicle for the culture of utilitarianism and political economy; and a unique, autonomous role as the marvellous place where transcendent (non-political) experiences are represented. All three choices may be recognized today in the spectrum of poetic writing: verse in birthday cards is trivial; verse in advertising is incorporated; but with Modernism, at the turn of the century, the third choice – the repository of transcendent experience – came to define poetry as such. ‘Art’ and ‘literature’ followed the same trajectory: they are believed to be the product of mysterious forces working through the creative genius whose vision soars above material conditions, society, politics. But although this produces an honoured place for the arts, it is at the cost of limited influence, marginality, even irrelevance. Their protected status confines them to a reserve, like an endangered species insufficiently robust to cope in the modern world. In idealist theory, art is envisaged, broadly, as one half of a binary formation. Poetry, literature, the arts, the spirit, nature, personal religion, intimate and family relations are constituted as ‘the human’, working counter to mechanical, urban, industrial and commercial organization in the modern world. But, actually, the whole framework belongs together and each part supposes the other. Art is constituted within the field of, in terms supplied by, the forces it opposes; it is their correlative. While we persist with this framework, therefore, we will never rescue the ‘human’, for it is set up as the necessary and weaker term in the binary – the other of political economy that enables it to know itself, the conscience of capitalism. The ‘human’ cannot triumph, because it affirms the binary through its very construction. And the further consequence is that other practices are released from the obligation to be spiritual, personal, human. We can build nasty suburbs, offices and shops if we list and preserve ‘monuments to the human spirit’. One makes space for the other. Idealist aesthetics often strives to discern an essential quality of literariness in admired texts, but actually a text may appear literary, or otherwise, depending on the contexts in which it is regarded. Not only does film become an art because people move it into that discourse; the kinds of film considered artistic are developed to include popular Hollywood genres. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott show how Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels have been plausibly discussed as literature (Bennett and Woollacott, pp. 254-9). The literary, as it is deployed in our culture, is less a property of texts than a way of reading and placing texts (Fish, pp. 10- 11). Conversely, respected texts may be read in non-literary ways. Entertain, for a moment, these temptations from an advertisement in the Sunday Times (8 June 1958) for a book club: ‘Have you thought of what social standing it gives you and your family – having good books about the place? They put you a whole class up – in the eyes of your neighbours and business friends. You’re “well-read” – the sort of family that’s a cut above the rest … for less than the price of a TV licence’ (Potter, Glittering, p. 120). This is a blatant version of the common assumption, that virtue must pass from the ‘good book’ to the person in its presence. But it all depends how the book is read; to suppose otherwise is the error of the censor and the aesthete. However, although any reader may apply literary practices to a text not usually so read (pop songs, for instance), or read a canonical text in an unorthodox way, only well-placed people can give authoritative recognition to such readings (T. S. Eliot can bring Milton into disrepute; Christopher Ricks, a Cambridge professor, can promote Bob Dylan to literary attention, specially when broadcasting on the highbrow Radio 3). In literature, as with the other stories we inhabit, only certain tellers have the power, normally, to define the boundaries of plausibility. Literature is writing that is acknowledged as such within a powerful publishing, reviewing and educational apparatus. And therein lies the answer to the famous question about why monkeys and computers cannot write it (though it is interesting that they are thought suitable for comparison). This is not to say that literature is trivial or false: on the contrary, it answers, albeit confusingly, to a real need. Marx noted of religion that, though illusory, it is ‘a protest against real wretchedness’ (Bürger, pp. 6-7). The need for ‘art’ is substantial, for it is the repository of all kinds of impulses that are produced and thwarted in our society. Moreover, despite the liberal-idealist attempt to quarantine literature from political import, it does disseminate, and with a distinctive authority, certain representations through the culture, inviting our assent that the world is thus or thus. It contributes, willy- nilly, to the making and legitimating of stories. Saying this, I am not overlooking formal qualities or the distinctive character of literature. As with any mode of communication, literary texts make best immediate sense when read in ways that are appropriate to them (it would be a mistake to take an Absurdist play as ‘slice of life’ naturalism). But when we have done this the text is still, in the larger analysis, telling a story about the world, and therefore it has a politics. The fact that a text is regarded as literary does not destroy its political import. Stephen Spender acknowledges ruefully that authors he admires were influenced by facism: ‘Their nostalgia led them into sympathising with whatever jack-booted corporal or demagogue set himself up in defense of order’. But, Spender says, ‘they did put literature before politics’ (Thirties, p. 165). Gerald Graff calls this a ‘limited liability’ theory of literary meaning, for it protects the author from the consequences of his or her utterances (Professing, pp. 151-2, 229-30). Now, we probably can read apparently right- wing texts in ways that will not add plausibility to their political stance. But that is how the case should be made; to assert that a book is ‘literature’ is not enough. These arguments indicate, in themselves, that literature is a contested category. In 1942 C. S. Lewis remarked of F. R. Leavis, in their dispute about the literary merit of Milton’s poetry: ‘It is not that he and I see different things when we look at Paradise Lost. He sees and hates the very same thing that I see and love’ (Lewis, C. S., p. 134). Rival stories about literature derive from alternative positions that are finally political, and the quarrel between them is about who is to define and dominate that cultural apparatus. I now discuss the conditions of cultural contest.  Contesting Stories Despite the powerful institutions through which dominant stories are maintained, there are other stories – subordinated perhaps, but not extinguished. Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology, declared: ‘The class which is the ruling material force is, at the same time, its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.’5 The point is surely only sensible: those with material power will control the institutions that deal with ideas, and that is why people are persuaded to believe things that are neither just and humane, nor to their advantage. But it must not be taken too narrowly. A principal insight of recent theory is that repression and resistance are involved in the same economy of power. Anthony Giddens observes: ‘Power relations are always two- way; that is to say, however subordinate an actor may be in a social relationship, the very fact of involvement in that relationship gives him or her a certain amount of power over the other’ (p. 6). Structure is enabling as much as constraining, therefore: it affords resources for both acquiescence and revolt. Another way to think this is to see that, for a subversive story to be handled and contained, it must be uttered, brought into visibility. To silence dissent one must first give it a voice; to misrepresent it one must first present it. And once that has happened, there can be no guarantee that it will stay safely in its prescribed place.6 Since cultural formations arise necessarily in relation to the social organization, one might expect the two always to be compatible. But the actual situation is more mobile and complex, due to the multitude of factors involved and with residual, dominant and emergent practices jostling together (Williams, R., Marxism, pp. 121-7). Any moment of stasis fades even before its shape can be fully appreciated. Dominant cultural formations are always under pressure, striving to substantiate their claim to superior explanatory power in situations where diverse features are resistant. Hence Raymond Williams’s argument that culture has always to be produced: ‘Social orders and cultural orders must be seen as being actively made: actively and continuously, or they may quite quickly break down’ (Culture, p. 201). For instance, when the first V2 rocket bombs fell in London in September 1944, with tremendous explosions, escalating in numbers by November to four and then six a day, the government told the press that they were to be treated as explosions of domestic gas; and the press co-operated. But Londoners guessed that this was a new weapon, and talked sardonically about ‘flying gas mains’. So eventually Churchill admitted in the Commons that this was a new rocket attack (though not, he said, serious in its scale or results – in all 2,724 people were killed and more than 6,000 badly wounded; Calder, p. 649). Here, the government could not make its story stick – despite control of the press and the ‘plausible’ idea of gas explosions. People decided that the events better fitted another story from their experience – the flying bomb. The idea of ‘flying gas mains’ encapsulates both their awareness that they were being misinformed and their mockery of the government’s supposition of their gullibility. They pretended to believe an implausibility – that gas mains might fly: since the government controls the official stories, alternatives are represented through self-conscious, deriding fantasy. Again, the story of the Dunkirk spirit and British people coming through the war because they believed in the national purpose is not the only story. At least some trades unionists felt that they were fighting on two fronts: Just as working people were determined to defeat Nazism in the war with the Axis, they were equally determined to root it out wherever it appeared, albeit in diluted form, in the factories. … As some contemporary commentators pointed out (generally in private), the engineers were fighting a war of their own which had begun long before September 1939.7 However, stories that powerful institutions don’t want to hear are maintained at a cost. When Mass Observation evidence of the fear, helplessness and disaffection of blitzed people was produced in the early 1970s, not only did civic leaders, past and present, deny that such things had occurred: even those who had written the original reports were amazed at how little they tallied with their later recollections (Harrisson, pp. 323- 7). We may glimpse here a cost in human anguish, as people interpreted their inability to match the official myth as shameful failure, and therefore suppressed it. A principal reason for disturbance in cultural production is that institutions have specific conceptual organizations; it is necessary that they should do so, for the roles they perform. Thus, for instance, we would expect City financiers and Church of England bishops to express different views about the need to reduce unemployment. Financiers have to appear to be acting in the interests of their shareholders, whereas bishops have to be seen taking a moral and humanitarian stance. Also, institutions have their own histories and internal structures. The liberal outlook of many bishops at the time of writing derives from the fact that they took orders in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and were influenced by the progressive mood of that time. It has taken two or three decades for some of them to reach positions of seniority. In other institutions, progressive attitudes came to the top very quickly and then went into recession. Television is a good instance: there radicalism peaked by 1970 and has been on the retreat ever since. City financiers, again, were hardly affected by 1960s radicalism (except perhaps drug-taking), so their trajectory has remained in this respect even. Also, we have to allow for divergences between the short- and long-term interests of an institution. Capitalist publishers ought to be wary of publishing Marxist books, but the existence of an immediate opportunity for profit outweighs such considerations (Williams calls this kind of thing ‘asymmetry’; Culture, pp. 98-107). To allow thus much autonomy to institutions is not to embrace pluralism. A pluralist analysis sees society as a complex of competing groups and interests, none of them predominant all the time. It sees cultural institutions as bounded systems, enjoying an important degree of autonomy from the state, and controlled by managerial elites that allow considerable freedom to professional operators. The alternative analysis holds that modern societies are controlled by a power elite or ruling elite, perhaps divided into such distinct apparatuses as business, government and the military, but acting generally in harmony, in the interests of itself and the economically dominant class.8 The present study takes the latter view. There evidently are diverse power centres and there may be conflict between them; but some are much more powerful than others, the powerful ones tend to act broadly in concert, and few of us have much access to them anyway. The relative autonomy of institutions results not from democratic principle but from the specific and hardly avoidable conditions in which they operate, and generally the ruling elite contrives to constrain, negate or accommodate that autonomy. Such structural kinks are inevitable in an extensively elaborated system; John Rex calls it ‘looseness of functional fit’.9 This case was made by Orwell in relation to the co-option of intellectuals into the wartime propaganda machine (interestingly, it undercuts the suppositions on which 1984 is based; see chapter 6 below). The government would have preferred to employ conservative people, he says, but the existing intelligentsia had to be utilized: No one acquainted with the Government pamphlets, ABCA lectures, documentary films and broadcasts to occupied countries which have been issued during the past two years imagines that our rulers would sponsor this kind of thing if they could help it. Only, the bigger the machine becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it. (Essays, II, p. 381) The vast elaboration of modern society produces a looseness of structural fit between institutions and ideologies, and the very demands of maintaining the dominant order create conditions whereby contradictions in it may become apparent. In fact, commentators estimate that intellectuals in the propaganda apparatus contributed significantly to the mood that produced the election result of 1945 and the institution of welfare-capitalism. Alfred Duff-Cooper, for a time Minister of Information in the war government, lamented in 1944 that Conservatism ‘had allowed itself to be deprived of the intellectual leadership of the nation’ (Calder, p. 587). The final evidence of the limits on the autonomy of cultural institutions is the way they are forcibly restrained when their relative freedom becomes embarrassing and ‘goes too far’. Since much of the work I am drawing upon was done, economic recession, unemployment, racism and the Irish situation have undermined the consensual, ‘arms-length’ arrangements that were supposed to pertain in Britain (see chapter 13). The police, higher and secondary education, the BBC, the Arts Council, local government, trades unions – all have become subject to closer central control, as the linked crises of the economy and state legitimation have produced strains and stresses. Even so, I have said, culture is necessarily under contest. Frank Parkin recognizes three major meaning-systems in Western societies: the dominant, the subordinate and the radical (Class, chapter 3). The dominant is the structure of understandings that successfully claims normative status; it is most fully and authoritatively represented in the cultural apparatus. Members of subordinated groups may subscribe to it through deference or aspiration. The subordinate system is accommodative: it adapts to, or negotiates, the dominant system, rather than endorsing or opposing it; this is characteristic of working-class culture and also, I would say, of the way many women handle the gender roles expected of them. The radical meaning-system promotes an oppositional interpretation of the social order; it is articulated, historically, through the politically aware sectors of both the working class and the middle class. The interaction of these systems in specific circumstances admits points at which change can be initiated. Three further points may be made about the nature and scope of dominant and other stories. First, we should recognize the current range of subordinate and oppositional standpoints. These are constituted not only around class. As Summer puts it, A developed capitalist economy creates social divisions according to non- property criteria. Age, sex and race are the most important criteria perhaps, but we must also recognise that social divisions also exist in terms of town versus countryside and intellectual versus manual labour … They constitute real social relations, when put into practice, and generate contending ideologies founded upon them. These contending ideologies [generate] practices and organisations [which] are articulated in forms reflecting their class character, but which are not solely founded on class relations. … ideologies of sexism, feminism, racism, black  consciousness, children’s power, etc., have a solid structural basis in the economy and a basis which usually has developed political and cultural extensions.10 Cultural struggle, therefore, may derive from and draw upon diverse subordinated and oppressed groups, and may be articulated from complex and interlocking positions. Second, the repertoire of oppositional strategies is complex and its effects hard to gauge. On the one hand, rejecting the dominant allows it to stigmatize or criminalize deviant practice, and leaves it unchallenged on its own ground. On the other, trying to work within the dominant, or to infiltrate and sabotage it, risks incorporation. The choices are difficult and so is analysis, for the dominant is adroit at recuperating dissent.11 Third, the subordinate and oppositional may not be continuously effective or fully apparent. Subordinate cultures which normally maintain an uneventful, negotiated relationship with the dominant, perhaps protecting their perceptions through distancing humour (Giddens, p. 72), may reveal inflammatory elements. Robin Blackburn invokes the instance of Vauxhall car workers at Luton, who were found in a social study to have a co-operative view of management and to be unlikely to experience ‘discontent and resentment of a generalised kind’. About a month after the publication of the report, 2,000 workers tried to storm the management offices, singing ‘The Red Flag’ and calling ‘string him up’ whenever a director’s name was mentioned (so it was reported in The Times). What the study did not allow, Blackburn concludes, was that the workers had two sets of attitudes. Generally they put up with a situation they could do little about and jogged along from day to day, deriving such happiness and fulfilment as they could from their immediate circumstances. But when roused by a particular incident, their dormant awareness that they were being systematically exploited was activated and found expression through traditional proletarian forms (Cockburn and Blackburn, p. 200). The point of principle here is that the subordinate or oppositional potential of a subcultural formation cannot be inferred from current practice.  Literature and Intervention The foregoing considerations apply to cultural production generally and to the apparatus of literature. Literary culture has been produced and consumed mainly within the middle class, but it should not be assumed that individuals or groups in positions of (apparent) cultural power simply or necessarily promote the dominant viewpoint. Classes in modern societies, because of the specialization of occupational roles, throw off class fractions, which develop distinctive cultural formations. Raymond Williams instances the Godwin circle, the Pre- Raphaelites, and Bloomsbury.12I relate literature, in Chapter 4, to a dissident middle-class fraction, arguing that this generates a certain radical potential. The literary text may be understood as an intervention: an attempt to render certain stories convincing. Orwell asked: ‘How is it that books ever come to be written? Above quite a low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one’s contemporaries by recording experience’ (Essays, IV, p. 87). The word ‘recording’ is not right: writing inevitably arranges and interprets, and the impression of fidelity to experience is part of the reality-effect through which authors seek to be persuasive. However, by making representations of plausible reality, literary texts intervene in the world. In my view, major academic theories to the contrary, writers’ intentions may be inferred from their writing. We do this through the same kinds of understanding that we use to infer people’s intentions all the time in diverse activities – previous experience, knowledge of registers, codes, forms and genres, internal coherence, the opinions of other people. Of course, we may get it wrong; that is always a condition of communication. This entirely normal process of understanding seems improper only when we’re under the sway of the notion of the autonomous genius-author who transcends ordinary mortal conditions to create meaning as if out of nothing. Once that has faded, both the discursive positioning of the writer and the direction of his or her intervention in the self- understanding of that society may be appreciated. To be sure, writing is constructed socially but, also, writing is one of the constructing agencies: it influences discursive processes as well as being influenced by them. Otherwise how could the sequence ever begin, continue or change? In this process, we are made, and we make. Pierre Macherey says: ‘The act of the writer is fundamental: he realises a particular crystallisation, a restructuration, and even a structuration of the data upon which he works.’13 Even so, the kind of intervention intended by the writer is not usefully considered as merely personal inspiration; it occurs within a framework of socially constructed possibilities (as speech and writing use the lexicon and grammar of the language). Nor need it dominate serious study, for once the text gets out into the world the conditions of reception are quite beyond the writer’s control. Literary texts are certainly read, all the time, in ways the writer did not mean – that is the condition, no less, of continuing attention. The study of cultural meaning has to consider how texts are ‘constituted as objects-to-be-read within the different reading formations which have modulated their existence as historically active, culturally received texts.’14 So I shall be concerned with what Orwell’s 1984 and Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and jazz and rock-’n’-roll, were taken to mean and by whom; more than with what we, today, think might have been intended, or take to be the most satisfactory readings. My quest is for the effects of the text in the world. The contribution of literary texts to the contest over signs and meanings is not necessarily either conservative or radical. Those texts nominated ‘literary’ are chosen because they seem plausible, and therefore the main effect must be to reinforce prevailing understandings. Raymond Williams observes: ‘The “persons” are “created” to show that people are “like this” and their relations “like this”’ (Marxism, p. 209): by appealing to a known model, the text tends to confirm the validity of that model. However, Williams goes on, literature, like other cultural practices, can break towards new understanding. There can be ‘new articulations, new formations of “character” and “relationship” ‘. Whether this happens will depend on general circumstances, and particularly on the current state of literary institutions. In principle it’s all open to contest, though in practice there are massive vested interests. The apparatus of literature has been made by people, and we can remake it. Texts may be read in different ways, different texts may be read (the Women’s Movement has shown this), we may alter the boundaries between literature and other discourses, or cease to use the category. So literary and other texts may be understood as powerful stories working in and beyond their initial historical moment, in our own lives and those of others. Notice how literary texts of any period return repeatedly to certain complex and demanding themes. This is because the stories that require most attention – most assiduous and continuous reworking – are the awkward, unresolved ones. They are what people want to write and read about. When a part of our world view threatens disruption by manifestly failing to cohere with the rest, then we must reorganize and retell its story again and again, trying to get it into shape – back into the old shape if we are conservative-minded, or into a new shape that we can develop and apply if we are more adventurous. The literary text, like all cultural production, is involved in these processes. To repudiate liberal-idealist notions of literature is not, therefore, to diminish its consequence. On the contrary, it is to see just where its importance lies: not in the magical evocation of unreal worlds of merely formal significance, but as a discourse of authority in the dispute about how to extend our sense of the possibilities of human lives. Notes 1 Sumner, p. 288. See Steedman, pp. 5-24; Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Hall, Hobson et al.; Harris, Beliefs, ch. 2; Hall and Jefferson, pp. 10-11; Fish, introduction, chs. 13-16; Bennett and Woollacott, ch. 3; Jochen SchulteSasse, in Bürger, p. xxviii; Gagnon and Simon, ch. 1. 2 ‘Emphasis Added’, in Showalter, p. 357. 3 Ohmann, pp. 203-4; see Naumann, p. 119; Stuart Laing, ‘The Production of Literature’, in Sinfield, Society; Wolff, pp. 40-8; Balibar; Macherey and Balibar; Bennett and Woollacott; pp. 108-9, 177, 291-3 below.  4 Sinfield, Alfred, pp. 11-21, 54-6. See also Bowlby, R., chs. 1, 6; Parrinder, pp. 85-119; Genette; Marcuse, One, ch. 3 and Essay, pp. 48-50; Brookeman, chs. 7,8. 5 Marx and Engels, p. 61. Cf. Althusser, pp. 139-42, 170-2; Mills, C. W.; Macherey and Balibar; Bourdieu, ‘Cultural’; Miliband, State, ch. 8. 6 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: the Instance of Henry V, in Drakakis, p. 215. See Colin Gordon, ‘Afterword’, in Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Sumner, pp. 223, 288; Hall and Jefferson, pp. 10-13; Morley and Worpole, pp. 96-7; Williams, R., Marxism, pp. 108-27; Swingewood, ch. 3; Jameson, pp. 144-8. 7 Richard Croucher, Engineers at War, 1939-1945 (London: Merlin, 1982), pp. iii-iv, quoted by Laurence Harris, ‘State and Economy in the Second World War’, in McLennan et al., p. 70; see also pp. 60-70. 8 See Stuart Hall, ‘The Rediscovery of “Ideology” ‘, in Gurevitch et al., pp. 56-62; Christopher J. Hewitt, ‘Elites and the Distribution of Power in British Society’, in Stanworth and Giddens, pp. 46-9. 9 John Rex, ‘Capitalism, Elites and the Ruling Class’, in Stanworth and Giddens, p. 219. See also Westergaard, pp. 28-31; Bowles and Gintis, p. 119; Hindess, ch. 7. 10 Sumner, pp. 233-4. See Bowles and Gintis, ch. 4. 11 See Dollimore, ‘Different’ and ‘Dominant’; chapter 8. 12 See Williams, R., Culture, pp. 74-83; Sinfield, ‘Power’. 13 Macherey, p. 232; see Bennett and Woollacott, pp. 188-203, and Wolff. 14 Bennett, T., p. 74. E. Ann Kaplan specifies her reading formation and that of MTV (pp. 29-31).