DAWES, 'CRITIQUE OF THE POST-ALTHUSSERIAN CONCEPTION OF IDEOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES', Postmodern Culture v1n3
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A CRITIQUE OF THE POST-ALTHUSSERIAN CONCEPTION OF IDEOLOGY
IN LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES
by
GREG DAWES
<gadfll@ncsuvm.bitnet>
North Carolina State University
_Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.3 (May, 1991)
Copyright (c) 1991 by Greg Dawes, all rights reserved.
This text may be freely shared among individuals, but
it may not be republished in any medium without express
written consent from the author and advance
notification of the editors.
_Literature and Politics in the Central American
Revolutions_, by John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman
(Austin: U of Texas P, 1990).
[1] One of the major contributions to literary studies in
recent years has been the recognition that political
consciousness is invariably fused with aesthetic practice.
In light of literary approaches prior to Fredric Jameson's
_The Political Unconscious_ (1981), which tended to isolate
and fetishize the text, such a development in cultural
studies can only be seen as salutary. Nonetheless, this
re-evaluation of the relation between the political and
aesthetic spheres has tended to gravitate towards an
interpretation of this dialectic as unconscious. This comes
in response, perhaps, to mechanistic formulations of the
conjunction of politics and art, but primarily to Georg
Lukacs' reflection theory. Althusserianism and
post-Althusserianism (or post-marxism) are certainly among
the most significant proponents of unearthing unconscious
impulses in cultural investigations. While Althusser's work
has largely remained intact--and in fact could be seen
exercizing a hegemonic role within Marxism--in spite of the
criticism directed at it, in many ways it has been unable to
overcome such structuralist contradictions as the division
created between science and ideology.^1^ Latin American
cultural studies has felt the impact of Althusserianism at
least since Marta Harnecker published her monumental study
_Los conceptos elementales del materialismo historico_ [_The
Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism_] in 1969; and
Marc Zimmerman and John Beverley's latest book, _Literature
and Politics in the Central American Revolutions_, comes out
of this Althusserian tradition as well as the
post-Althusserian and post-Marxist thinking of Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As I will argue below, many of
the old problems that plagued Althusser's concept of
ideology continue to afflict a work like Zimmerman and
Beverley's, not only on a theoretical plane, but also in the
practical analyses of historico-political events. While we
gain many insights into cultural phenomena through such an
approach, ultimately a gap is created between the theory, on
the one hand, and actual historical events, on the other.
[2] In their study, Zimmerman and Beverley make an upfront,
forceful, and compelling argument in favor of an
Althusserian ideological analysis which propels their study
forward and is aided by the adoption of Gramsci's concept of
the 'National Popular.' This theory provides the authors
with a foundation for elucidating a discussion on aesthetic
commitment in the Central American context and for
furnishing a reply as to why literature carries so much
weight in Latin America. Briefly stated, poetry, for both
Zimmerman and Beverley, accrues a significant and unique
value in the Central American region because it can function
as a symbolic arena which gathers together--from the optic
of Althusserianism--an assortment of feelings, images, and
myths.^2^ Poetry thus serves as a catalyst in forming
national identity in revolutionary circumstances in
Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua--all of which combine
nationalism and socialism in their ideology.
[3] Leaving aside the theoretical aspects for the time
being, as a historical tract on literary and revolutionary
vanguards in Central America, _Literature and Politics_
succeeds in providing the reader with detailed accounts of
the intersection of Roque Dalton's revolutionary commitment
and his poetry, the fusion of liberation theology with the
Nicarguan revolution, and the role of the testimonio as a
transitional, narrational mode. Beverley, of course, has
been one of the most astute analysts of the testimonio; and
this latest version (Chapter 7) is an expansion of the work
he has done in the past.^3^
[4] It is to both Zimmerman and Beverley's credit that in
this most recent analysis, the %testimonio% (documentary or
testimonial literature) is defined as a "transitional
literary form" which, as the authors put it, "does not seem
particularly well adapted to be the primary narrative form
of an elaborated postrevolutionary society, perhaps because
its dynamics depend precisely on the conditions of social
and cultural inequality and direct oppression that fuel the
revolutionary impulse in the first place" (207). While
Central American testimonial literature emerges from
conscious revolutionary activity, it is completely enmeshed
in this praxis. Hence, as Lukacs' argues in his analysis of
Willi Bredel's novels, while this working class narrative
production should be lauded as a great step forward, it
strikes me that the %testimonio% can %potentially%--as in
the case of Bredel's work--lead to a less complex
development of the revolutionary situation.^4^) This is
what makes testimonial literature a transitional narrative
form. It would be worth exploring the depth of Domitila's
"autobiography" with the less complete--yet still highly
important--_Fire from the Mountain_ by Omar Cabezas. In
contrast to George Yudice's view of the testimonial as a
struggle for survival,^5^ there is, then, as Beverley and
Zimmerman seem to suggest, a problem with testimonials which
respond to urgent or spontaneous political matters without
having analyzed socio-political matters thoroughly, because
they sacrifice to much in their representation of reality.
[5] Another chapter which is unique to _Literature and
Politics_--in the material it deals with--is Zimmmerman and
Beverley's interpretation of cultural practices during the
Nicaraguan revolution. To a great extent, our versions of
the aesthetic and political events that took place, from as
early as 1985 to the election, corroborate each other.
However, since the book was published shortly after the
February debacle, it appears that the authors did not have
time to evaluate the political and aesthetic effects that
the collapse of the Ministry of Culture and the rise of
Rosario Murillo and the professionalists could have on
cultural production. In their study there
is--understandably--a hesitancy to critique the model which
they have seen as exemplary of a type of resistance to
postmodernism in this hemisphere. I would contend that this
apparent weakness is due to the theoretical framework
itself, to which I would like to turn now.
[6] One of the main weaknesses in Althusserian theory is
the concept of ideology itself. As long as ideology in
general is specified in terms which have no reference to or
place for the struggle between labor and capital, then it
will only be, what Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez has called
"theoretical ideology" and will cease to operate
dialectically with material reality. Ideology will always
appear as secondary; superimposed in fundamental, timeless
struggles between sexes and generations, or strictly
divorced from actual, material struggles. Althusser, as
Terry Lovell has perceptively noted:
produces . . . a theory of knowledge which
eliminates experience altogether from the practice
of knowledge construction, relegating it to the
inferior realm of ideology. Experience becomes
the product of ideological practice, rather than
of social reality. It cannot therefore provide
any guide to social reality.^6^
What we observe in Althusser, then, is a break with the
Lukacsian notion of "reflection" in favor of the production
of "ideological effects" within a given text. In the
process, the French thinker could be seen as resorting to
formalist methods because the very material forces that
generate such "ideological effects" are put aside.
Following Althusser's mapping of ideology, history itself
interacts mechanically and not dialectically with it
(ideology) because the latter is ostensibly
"pre-scientific". When this gap between ideology and
history takes place, then the Althusserian model
relinquishes its materialist grounding in exchange for an
"autonomous," free-floating ideological apparatus that is,
according to Althusser, "ahistorical" and related directly
to Freud's notion that the "unconscious is eternal."^7^
[7] The danger inherent in this departure from dialectical
materialism is borne out in subsequent analyses of a
historical, political, economic and aesthetic nature.
Following Althusser, Beverley and Zimmerman in their work
allege that ideologies have
multiple power functions (of distinction,
domination, subordination) that are not reducible
to or intelligible in terms of class or group
interests alone, although they are the sites in
which class or group struggle occurs. Similarly,
they are not always circumscribed by modes of
production or concrete social formations; they can
cut across modes of production and social
formations, as in the case of religious
ideologies. In particular, ideologies are not
reducible to politics or political programs or
isms, because their nature is unconscious rather
than explicit; their effect is to produce in the
subject a sense of things as natural,
self-evident, a matter of common sense. (2)
In keeping with Althusserianism, this notion of ideology is
rooted in the unconscious, that is, specifically in the
"mirror stage" of development as elaborated by Jacques
Lacan.^8^ Althusser draws upon this Lacanian study in order
to formulate his theory of ideology, which returns to this
stage when the individual cannot distinguish him or herself
from the social. This domain, then, is located outside of
rational apprehension. Lacan writes that it:
situates the agency of the ego, before its social
determination, in a fictional direction, which
will always remain irreducible for the individual
alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the
coming-into-being (%le devenir%) of the subject
asymptomatically. (2)
It is this "method of symbolic reduction" that will serve as
the basis for Althusser's theory of ideologies. The problem
with such a philosophical position is that it is not
anchored in actual, real-life processes, but rather, is a
theoretical model constructed--so to speak--"above" this
material life. Consequently, in this method of analyzing
ideological forces one loses all grasp of the conflictive
nature of ideology (and, hence, of material life) because,
following Althusser, ideology is somehow beyond such a realm
since it is actually in the isolated "mirror stage."
[8] One of the main difficulties with the internal logic of
Zimmerman and Beverley's post-Althusserianism is that the
symbolic and the political are almost seen as two separate
entities. By alleging that literature in the Latin American
context--it is different, they maintain, in so-called First
World countries--is the symbolic site where ideological
production and revolutionary consciousness take place,
Beverley and Zimmerman endeavor to make the link between the
ideological and the political more visible. Real historical
events must somehow find a place in Althusserian ideological
criticism or--as both Beverley and Zimmerman surely would
admit--the approach will lose its sense of grounding. While
this connection is made at certain moments in _Literature
and Politics_, seen as a whole, their work fails to
convincingly break with this dualism. An immediate case in
point is apparent in the beginning of the first chapter when
they declare that:
The "work" of ideology consists in constituting
(Althusser: interpellating) human subjects as
such, with coherent gender, ethnic, class, or
national identities appropriate to their place in
a given social order or, in the case of
counterhegemonic ideologies, their place in a
possible social order. Ideologies provide human
beings with a structure of experience that enables
them to recognize themselves in the world, to see
the world as in some way created *for* them, to
feel they have a place and identity in it. (2)
In this post-Marxist definition of ideology--in contrast to
Marx's rendering of it as inversion--it acts as a social
catalyst which allows one to grasp one's life in the social
order in a more reasonable way. But at the same time,
ideology seems to operate independently of human beings:
Beverley and Zimmerman state that ideology enables human
beings "to see the world as in some way created for them."
This gulf between human beings and the production of
ideology is also clear when the authors argue against the
Marxist notion of "false consciousness":
The traditional problematic of ideology in the
social sciences, founded in both its positivist
and Marxist variants on the epistemological
question of distinguishing "true" from "false"
forms of consciousness, had been displaced in
contemporary cultural studies by the recognition
suggested in psychoanalytic theory that truth
%for% the subject is something distinct from the
truth of the subject, given that it entails an act
of identification between the self and something
external to it. (4)
But why focus %only% on the distinction between the self and
what is external to it? Why not concentrate on the
%dialectic% between subject and history? Furthermore, why
should we believe that what rules in aesthetic experience is
this marginalized, individual %jouissance% in contrast to
"external reality"? Doesn't this theory capitulate to the
same limitations as Freudian psychoanalysis in its
privileging of subjective sensations over reality?^9^ For
these authors, it would seem, ideology is asked to bridge
the gap between the individual and the society because the
integration of the two does not come about in their
analysis.
[9] In order to overcome the division that they have
created between ideology and politics, Beverley and
Zimmerman then turn to an Althusserian solution to this
dilemma, "We rejoin here the point that revolutionary
political consciousness does not derive directly or
spontaneously from exploitative economic relations, that it
must be in some sense produced" (8). Thus, as I suggested
above, literature serves as that desperately needed link
between ideology and politics that aids in the "development
of subject identity." In essence, then, literature (and
specifically poetry in this study) is a semi-autonomous
territory for the production of political consciousness in
Central America, but it is somehow divorced from the actual
social relations of production themselves. According to
this logic, it is the production of a certain type of
literature--"political" poetry, for instance--which enables
subjects to reflect upon "private experiences of
authenticity and alienation to the awareness of collective
situations of social exploitation, injustice, and national
underdevelopment" (9). But the weakness in a such an
argument--in addition to the separation set up between
individual and social experience--resides more fundamentally
on the privileging of the unconscious in aesthetics. For if
we agree that the motor force of ideology is the
unconscious, then what power do revolutionaries have to
change it, much less interpret it? If there are no
conscious, scientific methods to follow, then how do we
prove that this or that thesis is actually valid?
[10] All this theoretical footwork pushes Beverley and
Zimmerman's study into a corner on more than one occasion.
One such moment is in their analysis of literary production
in revolutionary Nicaragua. Before turning to this section,
I would note that another problem with this discussion of
Central American literature and revolutions is that Beverley
and Zimmerman fervently adhere to postmodernist
interpretations of the "unfixity" of social class
(i.e.--pluralism) and of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's
notion of "radical democracy." The idealism exhibited in
the writings of both Althusser and Laclau and Mouffe will
come back to haunt _Literature and Politics_ when the
analysis extends beyond the theoretical to the practical
realm. For example, in their study of Nicaraguan poetry
during the revolutionary period, Beverley and Zimmerman give
a very accurate account of the aesthetic and political
debate that ensued after 1985, yet the authors overlook the
fact that the deficiency in the Nicaraguan political,
economic and cultural system was the vulnerability of
pluralism. Thus, they assess the situation as follows:
Though the debate had repercussions inside the
Frente, the Sandinista leadership was reluctant to
take a firm stand one way or another on cultural
policy, for fear of making the mistake of the
Cubans in the late 1960s of favoring one cultural
"line" over others. But this commendable
commitment to pluralism also meant that cultural
policy was made ad hoc, without any real budgetary
priorities or control. (103)
Since their post-Althusserian approach automatically
excludes a more organic and materialist understanding of the
consequences of the economic and political
situation--because ideology is supposed to be relatively
independent from these spheres--Beverley and Zimmerman do
not interpret this aesthetic crisis on a more global scale
as the crisis of this type of "third path" to socialism.
Since representation, for Althusser, does not transcend the
aesthetic realm, they fail to acknowledge that the crisis in
aesthetic agency is also a crisis in economic and political
agency, i.e.--they fail to note that pluralist economic,
political and aesthetic institutions are affected by their
internal limitations and by the overwhelming force of
capital.
[11] This weakness in their analysis is due, in large part,
to the fact that they do not truly take a critical distance
with respect to this "third path." Their own study
advocates an aesthetic and political pluralism which doesn't
effectively distinguish itself from liberal pluralism. Even
late in Chapter 4, Beverley and Zimmerman continue to hold
this position vis-a-vis political and artistic
representation, "We are far from thinking that cultural
forms have an essential class location or connotation, as
our discussion in the previous chapter of the ideological
mutations of vanguardism suggests" (110). Here the fateful
error of post-Althusserianism or post-Marxism is fleshed
out. When aesthetic agencies are separated from the social
relations of production, then history itself will have a way
of turning any such idealist study on its head. In the
postscript to this chapter, Beverley and Zimmerman run into
precisely this dilemma:
[T]he perspective we adopted in our presentation
of this chapter--that the revolutionary process
was irreversible, despite problems and
setbacks--clearly has been problematized. It may
be that the revolution will go forward; on the
other hand, we may well be witnessing the first
stage of a more long-lasting restoration. We had
hypothesized in chapters 1 and 2 that one of the
key roles of literature in the revolutionary
process in Central America generally was to
constitute a discursive space in which the
possibilities of alliance between popular sectors
and a basically middle- and upper-class
revolutionary vanguard could be pragmatically
negotiated around a shared sense of the
national-popular. (111)
Here their populist or postmodernist theory meets the limits
of its interpretative abilities because history itself has
proven that this multi-class alliance, the concept of the
nationalism, and the experimental nature of a mixed economic
system were not able to sustain themselves. As Carlos Vilas
has demonstrated, it was the Sandinista's transformation
from a vanguard predominantly supported by the working class
and the campesinos to a party which catered to the interests
of entrepreneurs in the last years of the revolution, which
lost the elections of 1990.^10^ Similarly, in the cultural
realm, the Frente abandoned its cultural democratization
project not only because of financial problems, but also
because there was a shift in ideological positions within
party cadres themselves who now suggested that culture
follow more professional guidelines. As a result, the
professionalists--or, those who favored
professionally-developed artists--clashed with those who
defended the democratization program. Thus, the content of
this debate boiled down to differences in political,
economic, and aesthetic form--a regular "revolution with the
revolution" to paraphrase Regis Debray--among the
revolutionary forces.
[12] Given this historical context in Nicaragua, the
question we must then ask, to my mind, is: If it is
appropriate to cite the Nicaraguan revolutionary experience
as postmodernism lived out in the flesh, so to speak, and if
it did not survive a historical testing, then what other
socialist alternatives do we have in Latin America? What
type of revolutionary politics and theory would steer us
away from the errors of "real socialism" (i.e.--the Eastern
Bloc countries and the Soviet Union) and the faults of the
so-called "third path"? In searching for answers, it is
interesting to turn to a classical revolutionary pamphlet
that was written eighty-nine years ago, but which sounds so
very contemporary when read in these years of postmodernism:
I am referring to Lenin's _What is to be Done?_. In what
follows I would like to limit my remarks to the general
milieu in 1902 and to Lenin's elaboration of the role of the
vanguard.
[13] From the very beginning when Lenin addresses the
incipient "dogmatism and 'freedom of criticism'" of the
Economists to his manual for the organization of
revolutionaries, the political climate sketched out in _What
is to be Done?_ cannot help but sound very familiar to our
contemporary period. Lenin's attack on Bernsteinism begins
with a series of cardinal points that seem to represent the
revisionism of the day:
Denied is the possibility of putting socialism on
a scientific basis and of demonstrating its
necessity and inevitability from the point of view
of the materialist conception of history. Denied
is the fact of growing impoverishment, of
proletarianization and of the sharpening of
capitalist contradictions. The very concept of
'%the ultimate aim%' has been declared unsound,
and the idea of the dictatorship of the
proletariat unconditionally rejected. Denied is
the antithesis in principle between liberalism and
socialism. Denied is the theory of the class
struggle, on the grounds of its alleged
inapplicability to a strictly democratic society
governed according to the will of the majority,
etc..^11^
I cite this passage because it encapsulates the main strains
of political thought at the beginning of the twentieth
century and is representative of the types of leftism that
Lenin attempted to refute in _What is to be Done?_. This
fragment also is important because it is indicative of the
type of postmodernist "radical democracy" that we find in
the works of Laclau and Mouffe. This is not the place to do
a more exhaustive analysis of their work, let it suffice for
now to quote a segment from _Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy_ in order to establish the correlation between the
economism of Lenin's day and the economism of our times:
It is no longer possible to maintain the
conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated
by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical
course of capitalist development, nor, of course,
the conception of communism as a transparent
society from which antagonisms have
disappeared.^12^
In place of this Marxist analysis and prognosis we are
expected to struggle for "radical, libertarian and plural
democracy" which, Mouffe and Laclau inform us, will consist
of the dispersed identity of social agents and the ensemble
of social movements. However, we might reflect on whether
it is even possible to carry out this project at this
historical moment. In examining the Nicaraguan
revolutionary experience elsewhere and briefly in this
paper, I have noted how this pluralist political and
economic agenda doesn't present a viable, historically-
tested alternative.^13^ Similarly, Richard Stahler-Sholk
has persuasively argued that the Nicaraguan case "reveals
that the Sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing
at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small
producer, and state sectors) with multiclass 'national
unity' created a series of demands that were increasingly
difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and
longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation."^14^
[14] If this form of political (and aesthetic)
representation has failed, what other means are open to us?
In short, a consciously organized self-representation. At
certain moments in the Nicaraguan revolution workers' and
peasants' control over the actual means of production and
the aesthetic "means of production" became a viable option.
However, as I commented above, for both external and
internal reasons, the FSLN did not follow through with these
political and economic steps. As a thorough reading of
_What is to be Done?_ adduces to it is not the spontaneous
terrain of libertarianism, found in the works of Mouffe and
Laclau, that is able to survive historically, but rather
some new formulation of the notion of a %politically-
conscious vanguard% which is both of and for the working
class. This path is new at least in practice. Until the
"Cultural Revolution," perhaps the Chinese revolution
carried out this political, economic and aesthetic
alternative most effectively and Cuba, in varying degrees,
has also been successful in instituting political and
economic democracy.
[15] What is certain is that this revolutionary direction
can overcome the dualism exhibited in the writings of
post-Althusserianism between ideology and political
practice. Rather than driving a wedge between ideology and
politics and anchoring both in the realm of the spontaneous
(the unconscious), a Marxist reading of ideology suggests
that there is always a dialectical relation between material
life and ideology. To become conscious of this dialectic,
according to Marx and Engles, is to supersede the
distortions that accompany ideology.^15^ In Bolivia,
Domitila is and has been keenly aware of the need for a
conscious revolutionary proletariat and harbors no illusions
about "radical democracy" or the "pluralism" of class and
economic interests:
Soluciones momentaneas ya no nos interesan.
Nosotros ya hemos tenido gobiernos de todo corte,
"nacionalista", "revolucionario","cristiano", asi
de toda etiqueta. Desde el 52, cuando el gobierno
del MNR empezo a traicionar la revolucion por el
pueblo . . . tantos gobiernos han pasado y ninguno
ha llegado a colmar las aspiraciones del pueblo.
Ninguno ha hecho lo que realmente quiere el
pueblo. El gobierno actual, por ejemplo, no esta
haciendo obras para nosotros, sino que los
beneficiados son, en primer lugar, los extranjeros
que continuan llevandose nuestras riquezas y
despues los empresarios privados, las empresas
estatales, los militares y no asi la clase obrera
ni el campesino que seguimos cada dia mas pobres.
Y eso va a continuar igual mientras estemos en el
sistema capitalista. Yo veo, por todo lo que he
vivido y leido, que nosotros nos identificamos con
el socialismo. Porque solamente en un sistema
socialista ha de haber mas justicia y todos
aprovecharan de los beneficios que hoy dia estan
en manos de unos pocos.^16^
[Momentary solutions no longer interest us. We have
already had governments of every stripe,
"nationalists", "revolutionaries", "Christian", every
label imaginable. Since 1952, when the MNR [the
National Revolutionary Movement] government began to
betray the people's revolution . . . so many
governments have gone and none has been able to fulfill
the people's aspirations. None has done what the
people really want done. The current government, for
example, is not working for us, but rather the
beneficiaries are, in the first place, the foreigners,
who continue to take away our wealth; and in the second
place, the private entrepreneurs, the state businesses,
the military and not the worker nor the peasant: each
day we get poorer. And this will continue as it is as
long as we are in the capitalist system. I see, from
all that I have experienced and read, that we identify
with socialism. Because only in a socialist system is
it possible for there to be justice and for the
benefits to be enjoyed by all and not be in the hands
of a few [individuals]."]
------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
^1^ See Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez's _Ciencia y revolucion:
El marxismo de Althusser_ (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1978).
^2^ Beverley articulated this theoretical stance in his
seminal article, "Ideologia/deseo/literatura," _Revista de
critica literaria latinoamericana_ (1er semestre 1988),
7-24.
^3^ See especially, "Anatomia del testimonio" _Revista
de critica literaria latinoamericana_ (1er semestre 1987),
7-16.
^4^ Georg Lukacs, _Essays in Realism_, Rodney
Livingstone, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 23-32.
^5^ George Yudice, "Marginality and the Ethics of
Survival," in Andrew Ross ed., _Universal Abandon? The
Politics of Postmodernism_ (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988).
^6^ Terry Lovell, "The Social Relations of Cultural
Production: Absent Centre of a New Discourse," in Simon
Clarke, et. al., _One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the
Politics of Culture_ (London and New York: Allison and
Busby, 1980), 245. Hereafter cited in text. To verify
Althusser's position on this matter consult _Lenin and
Philosophy and other Essays_ (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971), 170-71.
^7^ Louis Althusser, _Lenin and Philosophy and other
Essays_ (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 160-61.
^8^ See Jacques Lacan, _Ecrits: A Selection_ (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1977), 1-7.
^9^ The question here is: How far does Beverley and
Zimmerman's Althusserian theory take us from the type of
dualism that Volosinov describes so precisely in his
critique of Freudianism?:
Inner experience [for Freud], extracted by means of
introspection, cannot in fact be directly linked with
the data of objective, external apprehension. To
maintain a thorough consistency only the one or the
other point of view can be pursued. Freud has
ultimately favored the consistent pursuit of the inner,
subjective point of view; all external reality is for
him, in the final analysis, merely the "reality
principle," a principle that he places on the same
level with the "pleasure principle" [emphasis in the
original]. V.N. Volosinov, _Freudianism: A Marxist
Critique_ (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 72.
^10^ Carlos Vilas, "What Went Wrong" _NACLA_ (June
1990), 10-18.
^11^ V.I. Lenin, _What is to be Done?_ (New York:
Penguin Books, 1988), 75.
^12^ Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, _Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics_
(London: Verso, 1985), 4.
^13^ A succinct version of my argument was presented at
the 1990 Modern Language Association meeting and was
entitled, "Contemporary Nicaraguan Politics and Aesthetics:
The Fate of Postmodernist Idealism." I have just finished a
more comprehensive development of this thesis in a
manuscript I have prepared for publication, _Aesthetics and
Revolution: A Historical Materialist Analysis of Nicaraguan
Poetry 1979-1990_.
^14^ Richard Stahler-Sholk, "Stabilization,
Destabilization, and the Popular Classes in Nicaragua,
1979-1988," _Latin American Research Review_ vol. xxv,
number 3 (1990), 55-88.
^15^ Here the key text is, of course, _The German
Ideology_. (New York: International Publishers, 1977).
^16^ Moema Viezzer, _'Si me permiten
hablar...'Testimonio de Domitila: Una mujer de las minas de
Bolivia_ (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1985).