A Theory of Literary Production (Routledge Classics Series) Book

Aye, aye, aye'the condition is the principle necessary for the process (i.e., the creation of a question). The *condition* is a theoretical object. Before we can discuss the *production* of a literary text, we must look at the conditions that give rise to it, I guess. One crucial aspect at the incipit of a text, Macherey argues, is LABOUR. The author is not a creator because he is one who reassembles. The endless seriphs and signs that turn into texts exist like elements, which the author combines. An author is no more a creator than a pianist is a piano-maker.

Another careful observation made by Macherey: when thought is reduced to art, it is stripped of history. Criticism distilled to technique is a universal function. Criticism should not be an art, but it is not a science. Science is empirical, but literary discourse avoids the rigorous nature of science whose subject matter is defined by strictness and coherence. The Hegelian interpretation of the historical process confuses history and theory, which makes theorising empirical.

Laying groundwork about the investigative ethics (if ethics is the right word), Macherey turns his eye toward what can be said definitively'the only empiricism in literary theory'about fiction: it has its beginning and its end, or envers/endroits. The detective story, he writes, is a useful metaphor for Spinoza's cause and effect: to solve the mystery of a detective novel, we may be tempted to flip through the mystery itself to find the answer waiting on the last page. The reveal, in this instance, is insouciant. In itself, it is meaningless; only by reading from the envers, passing through the production of plot, does the endroits'the unmasking of the culprit'gain any value or meaning. The solution of a mystery does not explain the causes of the mystery in the first place.

Thus, methodology and object are mutually determining: the method is necessary to construe any object, and the authority of the method is derived from the existence of the object. One depends upon, and changes with, the other as pole and antipode on a revolving product. For this reason, Macherey continues, the critic may well believe s/he has a relationship with the author, or perhaps in the author's eyes is necessary. Without the charged reader, the text is produced as a dead battery. And so, criticism which treats art as something to consume'as opposed to something with which we must be engaged'falls into the empiricist fallacy.

Macherey pivots at this point toward Poe's idea of poetic genesis: the author makes his/her beginning with an end in mind. By having one's end in sight, the author can move and pivot with calculated, conductor-like purpose. Readers, then, can read beyond the surface of a text trying to uncover the author's unspoken intentions. Here Macherey might suggest that we read in a writerly way (to adapt the phrase from Roland Barthes). (The term writerly, however, would not apply in Barthes' sense, since Macherey states explicitly that even the straightforward novel has chthonic currents that resist a linear narrative. All that is linear in a text is the pole and antipole. Whatever happens in between is suspect.) Macherey's ideal reader is always looking for a writer's motives, trying to anticipate the trajectory s/he will take. Behind the scenes of the straightforward, surface-level text, we find the swirling forces'nebulous impulses that are music-like in their primitive and languageless nature'that lead to the "controlled drama of genesis"

If ideas do not survive without context, and if a reader is crucial for the writer, then Macherey sees a neoclassical view of the critic wherein the commentary exists equally with the text. Criticism is not a judgment of good or bad. "The work is determined: it is itself and nothing else. Here we have the beginnings of a rational method. Our discourse can be more than just a commentary because there is nothing that can be altered in the discourse of the work. Thus stabilised, if not, as we shall see, immobilised, the literary work becomes a theoretical object" (40). One thinks of medieval history, folklore, etc. They become theoretical objects. The real about which we read last week is "formulated in the discourse of work" and "always arbitrary" because it "depends entirely on the unfolding of this discourse." between beginning and end, author and reader (p 37).

Throughout Macherey's production, he returns repeatedly to the question of whether any text can be an island unto itself. Balzac, when he writes of Paris, is writing about Balzac's Paris, but he knows we can populate it with our Paris. They are not the same, and the text relies on our world. Tolstoy's Napoleon, likewise, exists in a world where language has freedom to do what it wants without being held to our own world. "In short, a book never arrives unaccompanied: it is a figure against a background of other formations, depending on them rather than contrasting with them." (53)

The text is understood both through what it presents to us, as well as what it excludes. Gaps and lacunae are found and, using the zeitgeist of the text's creation, we can help produce a text. Production of literature exists in the significant ways an author alludes to our world while creating his/her own. The text, remember, is a background against other formations. The text is dependent on the world beyond it, and so the critic/reader is necessary. This is the "literary space" (62). It is the "scene of mystification." The writer sends empty messages, or rather coded messages. We reveal the truth of the absence. The author creates with labour. We, the critic, have the "labour of elaboration" (62).

Criticism is the act of reading beyond the surface; it is the reader's effort to get beyond the narrative between ends and understand that poetic genesis discussed above. The keystone, I think, of literary production for Macherey is absense, which lets a text maintain independence from a structure. As stated above, Balzac's Paris is not the real Paris, but depends upon our understanding of Paris.

Using this method of literary production, obviously, creates a problem for any text which claims to be authoritative, since no book is its own arbiter. Can a text exist outside of the structure of a sign, a signifier, and what it signifies? If not, no text is authoritative or true. The Bible must exist outside of the Structuralist's dilemma if it is to be authoritative. Macherey works with three uses of language: illusion, fiction, theory; the problem I found, though, is (what I perceived to be) his obsession with objectivism; or, maybe it's better to say that he wants desperately for there to be an anchoring point outside of the Symbolist structure. (I'm told Derrida was keen on Macherey before going down the SS&P edgelord freeway.) After 200 pages, one suspects Macherey wants his cake to eat and etc. By the end of the book, it's very clear he's taking all of Symbolism while stepping outside of it, proposing no clear solution. Surely, it ain't easy to come up with a sweeping, laconic essay that can dismantle Symbolist thought (which I still find attractive), while nevertheless clinging to its most clarion principles. Reading half of a century later, the answers to these stupid questions all seem much clearer, but that's because we're looking backward, obviously. For Macherey, he was putting his cigarettes out on the glass ceiling of Symbolism. A worn out cathedral with a frivolous confession booth. Yes! Yes, yes yes! yes, yes, yes, yes.

Truth fits uncomfortably in all three categories of lit for Macky. Where does this leave history and its pursuit of the real? Language precedes the world, constructing it according to its own rules of signification; fine. But, language also precedes the text, and labour precedes the language/text, and genesis precedes its own utterance. The book of Genesis, in fact'yeah, even the first axiom of the Book of John'must all be preceded by genesis. If "in the beginning was the word," then the big bang of thought was already permeated by Macherey's three uses of language: illusion, fiction, theory. Where then is room for authority? He doesn't address this, but he claims it. Where is room for the existence of a word outside of interpretation? When Roland Barthes declares all authors dead, we might hear from the past the echoing words of 19th century socialism and Louis Auguste Blanqui: Ni dieu ni maître! I don't think Macherey would agree, even if his book argues for just that pornhub link.