Interview: Balibar and Macherey - James H. Kavanagh and Thomas E. Lewis (Diacrtitics Vol 12, 1982, pp. 26-52)

pp.50-1 (Literary production)


MACHEREY:It is not a science of literature all by itself. From the outset, we refused to respond to the question: "What is literature?"

BALIBAR: But in a certain sense, we could not avoid at some moment acting as if we were giving such a response.

MACHEREY: No. On this point, I think we remained consistent. And all those who were working against us in similar fields at the time, they all raised again the question 'What is literature?,"and proposed their answers. Look at Sollers.

KAVANACH: Do you prefer the question: How can we construct a science of the literary text?

MACHEREY: Yes, but that is not at all the same question. And it is not a science of the literary text as such, as an isolated and autonomous phenomenon.

LEWIS: How would you characterize the productive analysis of literary texts?

MACHEREY: But what does one do when one speaks of literaryt exts? Are texts literary in themselves, by their own intrinsic characteristics, which distinguish them from non-literary texts? I think one must say that a text is literary because it is recognized as such, at a certain moment, under certain conditions. It may not have been so recognized before, and it may not be after. I did a lot of work on Jules Verne, at a time when no one spoke of him; now he has become an author, and everyone does his or her book on Jules Verne. He has been returned to "French Literature"; he is explained in class. But when I worked on him, he was not even a minor author; this was not "Literature."

KAVANAGH: Are texts ideological in themselves? Are there certain intrinsic characteristics that define them as ideological? MACHEREY:Ideology is present in texts as a material from which they are constructed. In this sense, it is something internal.

BALIBAR: It's ideology that is not being defined clearly. You are playing with two meanings. There is a spontaneous, idealist aspect of the term ideology, which appears again for political reasons at this moment- a period of defense of the rights of man against "systems of ideology," meaning the world of ideas more or less directly and consciously tied to politics. This sense of the term implies at once, in a contradictory fashion, something profoundly illusory and weak, and something extremely dangerous and powerful, because it holds men and women in an oppressive society. The meaning of the term ideology that we have tried to use from Marx, in the way Althusser began to specify it, was, from the beginning, totally different from this.