Literature in the Abstract: Althusser and English Studies in England

Althusser's work arrived just when the disintegrating liberal consensus was shaking the ivory towers of the university. Students protested the war in Vietnam as well as the policies of the university. Althusser offered an understanding of this corrupt world and its distorted self-image. These theories provided an exciting new totalization in which life had meaning and intellectuals, a vital role. In literary studies, students and lecturers assumed that works of literature were anti-scientific, preservers of the status quo, without genuine knowledge. Disillusioned, these students and lecturers condemned Literature as an institution and ignored the individual work. To stop teaching the dominant ideology, they found redemption through abstraction—general principles, abstract structures. Academics found it attractive to raise barricades in the mind, not the street. Althusserian ideas showed lecturers and students that what was thought to be a purely literary or factual matter of aesthetic appreciation was really ideological and political, but the arrogance of the Althusserians, who recognized no theory before Althusser and no value in empirical experience, offended potential allies. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss1/4 Literature in the Abstract: Althusser and English Studies in England David Margolies Goldsmiths' College, University of London The work of Althusser arrived in England in the wake of 1968, the annus mirabilis for countless students and academics whose world was going through extraordinary change and in which the traditional points of orientation had disappeared. The liberal consensus was disintegrating in an unprecedented public recognition that governments told lies-not just euphemisms or conventional denials of espionage, but fabrications of whole processes of events and complete misrepresentations of their actions at home as well as in the far-flung corners of the globe. The ivory towers of the universities were shaken, and even the English departments which had so long viewed the world from far above the struggle, were starting to experience upheaval of their own. When the English translation of Pour Marx appeared in 1969, Althusser provided a pattern in which this vague movement seemed coherent and nameless forces were given a name. Rarely has the solution arrived so close to the problem. The moment of the arrival of Althusser's work in England could not have been better timed for maximum influence. The events of 1968 had been more immediately and obviously political than the later struggles over ideology. 1968 was the year of Paris, where students took to the streets, built barricades, and fought off the riot police. It was the year of Prague Spring, where the flowering of popular socialist democracy in Czechoslovakia was brutally crushed by the tanks of the Soviet Union's "real existing socialism." It was the year of the Pentagon, where unprecedented numbers of Americans marched on the symbolic centre of American military might to demand an end to their country's genocidal war against Vietnam. This march was led by two of the country's best known literary figures, Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer. It was also the year of Grosvenor Square, where, in front of the U.S. Embassy in London, thousands of demonstrators against America's war in Vietnam were attacked by police who had been instructed by their officers that there was no need to be too restrained. And it was the year of the Chicago Police riot, where, in full view of the television cameras transmitting the Democratic Convention to the homes of America, crowds of peaceful anti-war demonstrators and mere observers were attacked by uncontrolled heavily armed police. Millions of viewers had never before seen anything like it. All 1 Margolies: Literature in the Abstract: Althusser and English Studies in Engl Published by New Prairie Press 28 STCL, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter, 1994) over the world the behaviour of governments was seen to be, not just brutal, but unprincipled, mendacious, and thoroughly corrupt. The supposed defenders of order, in addition to bending the institutions of justice, also managed to twist its principles: official ideology was rotten through and through. An explanation was needed, something free from the lies and prevarications of corrupt governments and something also that explained how, until that moment, those lies had, almost unnoticed, been perpetrated on the people. Enter Althusser. Althusser offered an understanding of the corrupt world and its distorted self-image. But it was more than that; his theories had the excitement of a totalization, something where all the pieces fell into place and in which all life had meaning. And, for students, this exciting new paradigm at last gave intellectuals a vital part to play (whereas most theories of the totality of human life had marginalized them, and Marxism in particular seemed to devalue their special intellectual attributes, allowing them validity only as auxiliaries of the major players on the stage of history). Students who took to the streets against governments also subjected their own institutions to the same critical perspective. Universities shared the corruption of governments. The most obvious villains were science departments, colluding with the military in their research into ever more destructive weaponry, but attention was also attracted to manufacturers of war material who were invited to recruit graduates on campus (the Dow Chemical Company and napalm is probably the best known example). The universities did not apologize; they justified their activities, pleading the exigencies of large public institutions. They pursued a euphemistic "realism" that avoided the issues of concern to the demonstrators, concealing facts and dragging statistical red herrings across the trail of open debate. Students picketed recruiters from the military-industrial complex, occupied university buildings and also began an attempt at alternative education, the teach-in. The once assumed posture of neutrality above the struggle and indifference to politics was no longer tenable in the universities. Students and universities had both to make a choice between moral principles and accountancy considerations; they were for justice or they were against it-and for the student movement no middle ground was conceivable. Choices were still made by individuals, but the terms were determined outside themselves, in the broad movement of politics. All choices had political consequences that went far beyond their own individualities; students were changing the world, freeing it from the corruption that had been made so evident. Liberalism was bankrupt; 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 18, Iss. 1 [1994], Art. 4 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol18/iss1/4 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1336