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[...] Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is in the phrase of one of its interpreters a 'hermeneutic of suspicion': its concern is not just to 'read the text' of the unconscious, but to uncover the processes, the dream-work, by which that text was produced. To do this, it focuses in particular on what have been called 'symptomatic' places in the dream-text--distortions, ambiguities, absences and elisions which may provide a specially valuable mode of access to the 'latent content', or unconscious drives, which have gone into its making. Literary criticism, as we saw in the case of Lawrence's novel, can do something similar: by attending to what may seem like evasions, ambivalences and points of intensity in the narrative--words which do not get spoken, words which are spoken with unusual frequency, doublings and slidings of language--it can begin to probe through the layers of secondary revision and expose something of the 'sub-text' which, like an unconscious wish, the work both conceals and reveals. It can attend, in other words, not only to what the text says, but to how it works.
[...] Some traditional critics would appear to hold that other people subscribe to theories while they prefer to read literature 'straightforwardly'. No theoretical or ideological predilections, in other words, mediate between themselves and the text: to describe George Eliot's later world as one of 'mature resignation' is not ideological, whereas to claim that it reveals evasion and compromise is. It is therefore difficult to engage such critics in debate about ideological preconceptions, since the power of ideology over them is nowhere more marked than in their honest belief that their readings are 'innocent'. It was Leavis who was being 'doctrinal' in attacking Milton, not C. S. Lewis in defending him; it is feminist critics who insist on confusing literature with politics by examining fictional images of gender, not conventional critics who are being political by arguing that Richardson's Clarissa is largely responsible for her own rape.
Another reason why literary criticism cannot justify its self-limiting to certain works by an appeal to their 'value' is that criticism is part of a literary institution which constitutes these works as valuable in the first place. [...] Shakespeare was not great literature lying conveniently to hand, which the literary institution then happily discovered: he is great literature because the institution constitutes him as such. [...]
[...] The idea that there are 'non-political' forms of criticism is simply a myth which furthers certain political uses of literature all the more effectively. [...] It is a distinction between different forms of politics--between those who subscribe to the doctrine that history, society and human reality as a whole are fragmentary, arbitrary and directionless, and those who have other interests which imply alternative views about the way the world is. There is no way of settling the question of which politics is preferable in literary critical terms. You simply have to argue about politics. It is not a question of debating whether 'literature' should be related to 'history' or not: it is a question of different readings of history itself.
Responding to an enquiry about his cultural perspectives in the years immediately after the Second World War, Williams comments:
I thought that the Labour government had a choice: either for reconstruction of the cultural field in capitalist terms, or for funding institutions of popular education and popular culture that could have withstood the political campaigns in the bourgeois press that were already gathering momentum. In fact, there was a rapid option for conventional capitalist priorities; the refusal to finance the documentary film movement was an example. I still believe that the failure to fund the working-class movement culturally when the channels of popular education and popular culture were there in the forties became a key factor in the
very quick disintegration of Labour's position in the fifties. [...]
[...] Perhaps life is kept going by our ignorance of its fundamental meaning, as capitalism is for Karl Marx. [...]
just thought this was a cool quote
Only by keeping your head down as you pick a precarious way through the minefield of human existence can you hope to survive, paying homage to cruelly capricious gods who often enough scarcely deserve human respect, let alone religious veneration. The very human powers which might allow you to find a foothold in this unstable terrain continually threaten to spin out of control, turning against you and bringing you low. It is in these fearful conditions that the Chorus of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King delivers its final gloomy judgement: ‘Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last'.
This may be a response to the problem of human existence, but it is hardly a solution to it. For tragedy, there is often enough no answer to why individual lives are crushed and mutilated beyond endurance, why injustice and oppression appear to reign sovereign in human affairs, or why men are deceived into chewing the roasted flesh of their own slaughtered children. Or rather, the only answer lies in the resilience with which these issues are confronted, the depth and artistry with which they are framed. Tragedy at its most potent is a question without an answer, deliberately depriving us of ideological consolation. If it demonstrates in its every gesture that human existence cannot tolerably carry on like this, it challenges us to find a solution to its anguish which is more than just another piece of wishful thinking, piecemeal reformism, sentimental humanism, or idealist panacea. In portraying a world in urgent need of redemption, it intimates at the same moment that the very thought of redemption may well be just another way of distracting ourselves from a terror which threatens to turn us to stone.
Heidegger argues in his work Being and Time that humans are distinguished from other beings by their capacity to put their own existence into question. They are the creatures for whom existence as such, not just particular features of it, is problematic. This or that situation might prove problematic for a warthog, but – so the theory goes – humans are those peculiar animals who confront their own situation as a question, quandary, source of anxiety, ground of hope, burden, gift, dread, or absurdity. And this is not least because they are aware, as warthogs presumably are not, that their existence is finite. Human beings are perhaps the only animals who live in the perpetual shadow of death.
The question ‘What is the meaning of life? might have seemed to an ancient Hebrew as curious as the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ For most people today, including a lot of religious believers, the latter question is unconsciously modelled on questions like ‘Do you believe in Father Christmas?’, or ‘Do you believe in alien abductions? [...] But an ancient Hebrew would probably not have imagined that ‘Do you believe in God?’ meant anything like that. Since the presence of Yahweh was proclaimed by the whole earth and heavens, the question could only mean: ‘Do you have faith in him?’ It was a matter of a practice, not of an intellectual proposition. It asked about a relationship, not about an opinion.
on the meaning of life being, at least in pre-modern times, obvious, in the sense of
a "solid foundation to human existence known as God"
Postmodernism then pushes this secularization one step further. As long as we still have depths, essences, and foundations, it insists, we are still in the awesome presence of the Almighty. We have not really killed and buried God at all. We have simply given him a series of majestic new names, like Nature, Man, Reason, History, Power, Desire, and so on. Rather than dismantling the whole outdated apparatus of metaphysics and theology, we have simply given it a new content. Only by breaking with the whole notion of ‘deep’ meaning, which will always tempt us to chase the chimera of the Meaning of meanings, can we be free. Not, to be sure, free to be ourselves, for we have also dismantled the metaphysical essence known as the self. Quite who is to be set free by this project, then, remains something of a mystery. It may also be that even postmodernism, with its aversion to absolute foundations, secretly smuggles such an absolute into the argument. It is not, to be sure, God or Reason or History, but it behaves in just such a bottom-line sort of way. Like these other absolutes, it is impossible to delve beneath it. For postmodernism, this is known as Culture.
his writing is kind of curmudgeonly but in a remarkably fun way