title: Ideology and Narrative Realism: a Critique of Post-Althusserian Anti-Realism
Creators: name: Prenzler, Timothy James
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 1991
Subjects: subject: Realism
subject: narrative
subject: post-Althusserian anti-realism
subject: empiricism
subject: capitalism

description: This thesis defends the potential of the ‘realist’ form of narrative for contesting, as well as reproducing, ideology. The common form of ‘realism’ consists of a loose ensemble of conventions. The key components are omniscient, evaluative narration; an empiricist objectivism; the construction of individuals as agents of action and bearers of natural attributes; cause and effect sequencing; conflict leading to resolution; mystery leading to disclosure; and the effacement of these techniques in the interests of illusion. In one critique of realism – ‘post-Althusserian anti-realism’ - these practices constitute ideology both in a general sense - as manipulation - and a specific sense - as transmitters of capitalist presuppositions. A 'social realism' or ‘critical realism’, which attempts to invalidate ideology by the presentation of countervailing data, is said to be undercut by its encoding within this alleged inherently ideological form. This critique of realism is based on an unsustainable, ‘formalist’, reduction of ‘content’ to ‘form’. The role of observation in knowledge production and the significance of inductively generated propositions are replaced by a sophisticated, but ultimately reductive, ‘discursive determinism’. From its conventionalist epistemological premises, post-Althusserian anti-realism ignores the capacity of empiricism to break with preconceptions. By dismissing the convention of accountability to evidence, the critique is forced back onto criteria of internal consistency - a position even more vulnerable to prejudice than empiricism. The thesis then argues that the concomitant view of the subject of narrative realism as a construct of liberal-individualism ignores how realist texts have questioned ideas of autonomy and a fixed human nature. Anti-realist methods have usefully exposed some of the means by which constructions of freedom and self-determination mask the subordination of labour in ‘free’ -market economies. However, this frequently entails undervaluing gains made under a rubric of human rights. The replacement of human subjectivity with discursive or economic determinism tends to expel dialogue, volition and human needs as factors in the ideational and practical repudiation of ideology. A narrow approach to realism is therefore inadequate for determining the relation of realism to ideology. The alternative position defended here is that realism’s relation to capitalism - like that of liberalism and empiricism - is tangential, not homologous. The variability of ‘content’ in realism makes realist techniques - as abstract form - politically neutral (but claimed by anti-realists to be intrinsically authoritarian). Realist conventions which construct a point of view are open options for making judgements that will vary in empirical rigour and opposition to different ideologies. The thesis sets the authoritarian aspects of realism’s attempted manipulation of the reader against the potential in realism for a dialogic plurality of perspectives, the possible defensibility of a point of view, the need for coherence and judgement in political dialogue and action, and the frequency of ‘content’-based reader resistance. The realist form is not an absolute of representation, but nor is it a mere reflex of capitalism. By the same token, the anti-realist concept of the anti-ideological function of ‘anti-realist’ texts imposes a reverse, homogeneous, inherently oppositional role onto politically heterogenous cultural forms. The thesis argues, furthermore, that by rejecting empiricist modes of substantiation and adopting a mechanistic view of ideology, the post-Althusserian critique of realism fails to engage adequately with the theoretical defence of capitalism. The harmony thesis of free enterprise can only be given a pejorative label ‘ideology’ on the basis of comparative and historical considerations of the performance of capitalism. In practice, the natural tendency of the market to cyclical instability with attendant unemployment, impoverishment and the compounding of class-based inequalities has only been mitigated by extensive government intervention. The thesis concludes then with a case study of Dickens’s Hard Times as an example of the above, more effective, approach to capitalist legitimation. Hard Times employs empiricist, semi-‘fictional’, ‘realist’ techniques to demonstrate the ideological nature of theories of free enterprise. The critical edge of this novel is blunted by a liberal-romanticism that is ambivalent about legal-institutional solutions to social problems. Despite this fault, Hard Times shows some of the possibilities offered by the realist form for viable social critique.