(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
 

ON INTERPRETATION: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act    
 

17
 

Traditional literary history has…never prohibited the investigation of such topics as the Florentine political background in Dante, Milton’s relationship to the schismatics, or Irish historical allusions in Joyce. I would argue, however, that such information— even where it is not recontained, as it is in most instances, by an idealistic conception of the history of ideas—does not yield interpretation as such, but rather at best its (indispensable) preconditions.
 

18
 

We will have enough occasion, in the pages that follow, to emphasize the methodological interest of Christian historicism and the theological origins of the first great hermeneutic system in the Western tradition…
 

19
 

My position here is that only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism evoked above.
 

20
 

From this perspective the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that structural, experiential and conceptual gap between the public and the private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the “individual,”…
 

21
 

It is…increasingly clear that hermeneutic or interpretive activity has become one of the basic polemic targets of contemporary post-structuralism in France, which—powerfully buttressed by the authority of Nietzsche—has tended to identify such operations with historicism, and in particular with the dialectic and its valorization of absence and the negative, its assertion of the necessity and priority of totalizing thought. I will agree with this...but…the critique is misplaced. …Anti-Oedipus…

 

22

Deleuze…Guattari…denounced system of allegorical interpretation in which the data of one narrative line are radically impoverished by their rewriting according to the paradigm of another narrative.
 

23
 

n7 …Deleuze and Guattari’s proposal for an antiinterpretive method (which they call schizo-analysis) can equally well be grasped as a new hermeneutic…new “methods” of this kind: thus, the archeology of knowledge, but also, more recently, the “political technology of the body” (Foucault), “grammatology” and deconstruction (Derrida), “symbolic exchange” (Baudrillard), libidinal economy (Lyotard), and “semanalyse” (Kristeva).
 

24
 

The mechanistic system, Cartesian in origin, which reduced causality to a transitive and analytical effectivity, could not be made to think the effectivity of a whole on its elements.
 

…conceived precisely in order to deal with the effectivity of a whole on its elements: the Leibnitzian concept of expression. This is the model that dominates all Hegel’s thought. But it presupposes in principle that the whole in question be reducible to an inner essence …
 

…an element (economic, political, legal, literary, religious, etc., in Hegel)…inner essence/outer phenomenon…presupposed that the whole had…the nature of a “spiritual” whole in which each element was expressive of the entire totality…
 

… “Darstellung”, the key epistemological concept of the whole Marxist theory of value…whose object is …to designate the mode of presence of the structure in its effects, and therefore to designate structural causality itself.
 

25
 

Althusser’s first type of effectivity, that of mechanistic or mechanical causality, exemplified in the billiard-ball model of cause and effect…
 

…concept of “base” (infrastructure and “superstructure”—for it to have no small stake in the reexamination of this type of causality.
 

…unquestionable causal relationship between the admittedly extrinsic fact of the crisis in late nineteenth-century publishing, during which the dominant three-decker lending library novel was replaced by a cheaper one-volume format, and the modification of the “inner form” of the novel itself. The resultant transformation of the novelistic production of a writer such as Gissing must thus necessarily be mystified… Kermode
 

26
 

…separation of the use value from exchange value generates discontinuities of precisely the “scandalous” and extrinsic type, rifts and actions at distance which cannot ultimately be grasped “from the inside’ or phenomenologically…
 

…salutary reminder of the ultimately material base of cultural production, and of the “determination of consciousness by social being.” Althusser
 

The counter-slogan of: "totalization” cannot be the immediate response to Althusser’s critique of “expressive causality”… itself stigmatized by this term…
 

27
 

Hegel …is its central exhibit … related to problems of cultural periodization in general and to that of the category of a historical “period” in particular.
 

…the Althusserian critique is quite unanswerable, which demonstrates the way in which the construction of historical totality necessarily involves the isolation and the privileging of one of the elements within that totality. …becomes a master code or “inner essence”… answer to the now impermissible interpretive question, “what does it mean?”
 

n12 …Marxist theories of so-called “stages” in the transition to socialism: these range from Lenin’s theory of imperialism and Stalin’s distinctions between “socialism” and “communism” …the polemic against “historicism” is part of the more general Althusserian offensive within the French Communist Party against Stalinism… The classical structuralist and semiotic arguments against historicism are to be found in the concluding chapter [“History and Dialectic”] of Claude Levi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind…
 

 

28
 

…representation of History itself. There is in other words a synchronic version of the problem: that of the status of an individual “period” in which everything becomes so seamlessly interrelated that we confront either a total system or an idealistic “concept” of a period; and a diachronic one, in which history is seen in some “linear’ way as the succession of such periods, stages, or moments. I believe that this second problem is the prior one…
 

The fullest form of what Althusser calls “expressive causality” (and of what he calls “historicism”) will thus prove to be a vast interpretive allegory in which a sequence of historical events or texts and artifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and more “fundamental” narrative, of a hidden master narrative which is the allegorical key or figural content of the first sequence of empirical materials. …include providential histories (such as those of Hegel or Marx), catastrophic visions of history (such as that of Spengler), and cyclical or Viconian visions of history alike.
 

29
 

… Althusserian dictum, “History is a process without a telos or a subject” …repudiation of such master narratives and their twin categories of narrative closure (telos) and of character (subject of history).
 

…often characterized as being “theological” …patristic and medieval system of the four levels of scripture… ideological mission as a strategy for assimilating the Old Testament to the New… its [original] insistence on preserving the literality of the original texts…
 

…grounded in the conception of history itself as God’s book…
 

…life of Christ… a second, properly allegorical level, in terms of which the latter may be rewritten. …Henri de Lubac, Exegese medievale...
 

30
 

…rewriting of the bondage of the people of Israel in Egypt as a descent of Christ into hell after his death on the cross…
 

… ideology… Althusser’s sense as a representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History.
 

…precisely this reduction of the alien collective to the valorized individual biography which then permits the generation of two further interpretive levels… believer is able to “insert” himself …moral and anagogical…
 

…textual apparatus is transformed into a “libidinal apparatus,” a machinery for ideological investment.
 

…moral level… bondage of the people of Israel… thralldom of the believer-to-be to sin…
 

31
 

…anagogical… from the story of a particular earthly people it has been transformed into universal history and the destiny of humankind as whole…
 

Anagogical – political reading (collective “meaning” of history)

Moral -- psychological reading (individual subject)

Allegorical – allegorical key or interpretive code

Literal -- historical or textual referent
 

…relationship the Christian scheme projects between anagogical and moral is not available to us today…
 

…American “pluralism,” with its unexamined valorization of the open (“freedom”) versus its inevitable binary opposition, the closed (“totalitarianism”).
 

32
 

…it was clear to the medieval theorists that their four levels constituted a methodological upper limit and a virtual exhaustion of interpretive possibilities.
 

…Althusserian critique of expressive causality may be seen to strike beyond its immediate target in so-called Hegelian idealism, at the implicit or explicit theodicy that must emerge from interpretations that assimilate levels to one another and affirm their ultimate identity.
 

…Althusser’s …general attack on allegorical master codes also implies a specific critique of the vulgar Marxist theory of levels, whose conception of base and superstructure with the related notion of the “ultimately determining instance” of the economic…
 

33
 

… Lukacs’ essay on realism may serve as central example of the way in which the cultural text is taken as an essentially allegorical model of society as a whole, its tokens and elements, such as the literary “character,” being read as “typifications” of elements on other levels, and in particular as figures for the various social classes and class fractions.
 

…allegorical decipherment takes place in which the conception of class interest supplies the functional or link between a superstructural symptom or category and its “ultimately determining: reality in the base.
 

…we must enlarge its master code or allegorical key to the point at which the latter becomes a master narrative in its own right…
 

Althusserian school… effectively discredited the Marxian versions of a properly teleological history …restore the problematic of the mode of production as the central organizing category of Marxism.
 

34
 

… if interpretation in terms of expressive causality or of allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because such master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them…
 

But if this is where the study of “expressive causality” leads, then to switch it off at the source entails the virtual repression of the text of history and the political unconscious in our own cultural and practical experience, just at the moment when increasing privatization has made that dimension so faint as to be virtually inaudible.
 

… Althusser’s antiteleological formula for history (neither a subject nor a telos), based … on Lacan’s notion of the Real as that which “resists symbolization absolutely” and on Spinoza’s idea of the “absent cause.”
 

35
 

…Althusser … does not at all draw the fashionable conclusion that because history is a text, the “referent” does not exist.
 

…not a text… as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and … our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious. …acknowledges the powerful Althusserian objections to expressive causality and to interpretation generally, while making a local place for such operations.
 

Mode of Production, or Structure
 

 

…Althusserian conception… the forces of production, the labor process, technical development, or relations of production, such as the functional interrelation of social classes—is , however privileged, not identical with the mode of production as a whole, which assigns this narrowly “economic” level its particular function and efficiency as it does all the others.
 

…mode of production itself… “structure” is an absent cause, since it is nowhere empirically present as an element, it is not part of the whole or one of the levels, but rather the entire system of relationships among those levels.
 

37
 

… “Hegel” here is a secret code word for Stalin… in Lukacs’ work, “naturalism” is a code word for “socialist realism”…
 

38
 

The current Marxist emphasis on the “semi-autonomy” of the state and its apparatuses, which we owe to the Althusserians, is intended to cast the gravest doubts on these interpretations of the “text” of the state (seen as simply replicating other levels), and to encourage attention both to the semi-autonomous dynamics of bureaucracy and the state apparatus in the Soviet system, and to the new and enlarged apparatus of the state under capitalism as a locus for class struggle and political action, rather than a mere obstacle which one “smashes.”
 

…the text… some context… simply replicate the latter ideologically, or does it possess some autonomous force in which it could also be seen as negating that context?
 

…Althusserian conception of structure has often seemed to its adversaries to constitute a renewed defense of the reified specialization of the bourgeois academic disciplines, and thereby an essentially antipolitical alibi.
 

40
 

...[object of Althusser critique]…more modern characterization of mediation…process of transcoding… strategic choice of a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or “texts,” or two very different structural levels of reality. … (the separation…of the ideological from the political, the religious from the economic, the gap between daily life and the practice of the academic disciplines) is at least locally overcome …. reunification would remain purely symbolic …were it not understood that social life is in its fundamental reality one and indivisible, a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process….
 

41
 

Althusser …means to underscore some ultimate structural interdependency of the levels, but that he grasps this interdependency in terms of a mediation that passes through the structure, rather than a more immediate mediation in which one level folds into another directly.
 

…like all Marxisms, necessarily insist on the interrelatedness of all elements in a social formation; only it relates them by way of their structural difference and distance from one another, rather than by their ultimate identity, as he understands expressive causality to do.
 

…against Althusser’s own formulation of the problem is that the distinguishing of two phenomena from each other, their structural separation, the affirmation that they are not the same, and that in quite specific and determinate ways, is also a form of mediation.
 

42
 

…modernism—far from being a mere reflection of the reification of late nineteenth-century social life—is also a revolt against that reification and a symbolic act which involves a whole Utopian compensation for increasing dehumanization on the level of daily life…
 

43
 

The true target of the Althusserian critique would seem to be not the practice of mediation, but… the structural notion of homology (or isomorphism, or structural parallelism)…
 

44

… Althusserian reminder of the need to respect the relative autonomy of the various structural levels is timely; and it would seem to me that the related injunction to build a hierarchical model in which the various levels stand in determinate relations of domination or subordination to one another, can best be fulfilled, in the area of literary and cultural analysis, by a kind of fiction of the process whereby they are generated...
 

45
 

One cannot without intellectual dishonesty assimilate the “production” of texts (or in Althusser’s version of this homology, the “production” of new and more scientific concepts) to the production of goods by factory workers; writing and thinking are not alienated labor in that sense…
 

46
 

… A.J. Greimas… for sexual relations, the four logical possibilities of marital relations, normal relations, abnormal relations and extramarital relations; for rule systems, those of prescriptions, taboos, nonprescriptions, nontaboos… the empty slots and logical possibilities necessarily obtaining in all of them… seem to map out what he takes to be the logical structure of reality itself… what Umberto Eco has termed an “ontological structuralism” …permanence of the categories of logic or mathematical thought.
 

47
 

One of the essential themes of this book will be the contention that Marxism subsumes the other interpretive modes or systems; or to put it in methodological terms, that the limits of the latter can always be overcome, and their more positive findings retained, by a radical historicizing of their mental operations, such that not only the content of the analysis, but the very method itself, along with the analyst, then comes to be reckoned into the “text” or phenomenon to be explained.
 

48
 

…the very closure of the “semiotic rectangle” now affords a way into the text, not by positing mere logical possibilities and permutations, but rather through its diagnostic revelation of terms or nodal points implicit in the ideological system which have, however, remained unrealized in the surface of the text, which have failed to become manifest in the logic of the narrative, and which we can therefore read as what the text represses.
 

…for the practice of a more genuinely dialectical negation in the tension between the realized and the unrealized terms…mapped according to the various dynamic possibilities (generation, projection, compensation, repression, displacement… into the very political unconscious, of the text…
 

49
 

Thus, by means of a radically historicizing reappropriation, the ideal of logical closure which initially seemed incompatible with dialectical thinking, now proves to be an indispensable instrument for revealing those logical and ideological centers a particular historical text fails to realize, or on the contrary seeks desperately to repress.
 

…wholly new Marxism emerges that has no relationship at all to the classical categories in which dialectical philosophy has been couched.
 

… Althusser – Lukacs debate… (1) …adequacy of any storytelling framework in which History might be represented: (2) …social class, and its availability as a “subject of history” … (3) …relationship of praxis to structure… (4)…synchronic, and its adequacy … adequacy of the older dialectical vision of diachronic… (5) … contradiction, and its formulation within the new structural or synchronic framework …radically distinguished from the semiotic categories of opposition, antinomy, or aporia; (6) …notion of a totality… radically to differentiate his concept of a properly structural totality from… Hegelian Marxism (Lukacs, Sartre)…
 

50
 

Lukacs’ notion of totality (outlined in History and Class Consciousness) and Sartre’s methodological ideal of totalization (described in the Critique of Dialectical Reason) have generally been condemned by association with Hegel’s Absolute Spirit…
 

Marx…argued that Hegel mistakenly assimilated objectification, a universal human process, with its unique historical form under capitalism, which is rather to be designated as alienation…
 

51
 

… Utopia (read: communism) is understood as achieving its ultimate identity by the obliteration of difference through sheer force … nouveaux philosophes, in which a direct line runs from Hegel’s Absolute Spirit to Stalin’s Gulag.
 

…two major Marxian studies of Hegel… third term beyond the alternatives of romantic reaction and bourgeois utilitarianism. Rather than diagnosing some irremediable vice of “idealism” in Hegel’s thought, we must more modestly accuse him of not having been able, in his historical moment, to become Marx.
 

… Hegelian dialectic emerges precisely from his own assault on “identity theory,” in the form of Schelling’s system, which he stigmatized in the famous remark about “the night in which all cows are gray”
 

52
 

… Lukacs’ method of ideological critique—like the Hegelian dialectic itself and its Sartrean variant, in the methodological imperative of totalization proposed in the Critique—is an essentially critical and negative, demystifying operation.
 

53
 

… Hegel’s great dictum, “the true is the whole,” is less an affirmation of some place of truth which Hegel himself (or others) might occupy, than it is a perspective and a method whereby the “false” and ideological can be unmasked and made visible. …negative and methodological status of the concept of “totality” …
 

The value of the molecular in Deleuze…depends structurally on the preexisting molar or unifying impulse against which its truth is read. We will therefore suggest that these are second-degree or critical philosophies, which reconfirm the status of the concept of totality by their very reaction against it…
 

54
 

… Adorno’s “negative dialectic,” with its counteraffirmation—“the whole is the untrue” …
 

n31 The critique of totalization in France goes hand in hand with a call for a “molecular” or local, nonglobal, nonparty politics: and this repudiation of the traditional forms of class and party action evidently reflects the historic weight of French centralization… Ethnic groups, neighborhood movements, feminism, various “coutercultural” or alternative life-style groups, rank-and-file labor dissidence, student movements, single-issue movements—all theoretically incompatible with each other and impossible to coordinate on any practical political basis. The privileged form in which the American Left can develop today must therefore necessarily be that of an alliance politics; and such a politics is the strict practical equivalent of the concept of totalization on the theoretical level.
 

55
 

… Althusserian notation of History or the Real as an “absent cause.” Totality is not available for representation, any more than it is accessible in the form of some ultimate truth (or moment of Absolute Spirit)…
 

[Sartre]… Les Chemins de la Liberte… “A hundred million free consciousnesses, each aware of walls, the glowing stump of a cigar, familiar faces, and each constructing its destiny on its own responsibility. And yet each of those consciousnesses, by imperceptible, contacts and insensible changes, realizes its existence as a cell in a gigantic and invisible coral. War…”
 

If it is overhasty to characterize the traditional concept of a totality as organic, and even less adequate to characterize its opposite number, the concept of structure, as mechanical… juxtaposition of the two in terms of the aesthetic that each projects.
 

56
 

…expressive totality… Hegel and Lukacs implies the value of what is sometimes called organic form… expressive causality—is accordingly to seek a unified meaning to which the various levels and components of the work [of art] contribute in a hierarchical way.
 

… S/Z , shatters a Balzac novella into a random operation of multiple codes, the Althusserian/Marxist conception of culture requires this multiplicity to be reunified, if not at the level of the work itself, then at the level of its process of production…
 

57
 

… New Criticism on. We will argue in subsequent sections that an immanent criticism in this sense is a mirage.…an interpretive or hermeneutic act: and with this assertion—that a mode of interpretation exists which is specific to Althusser’s third or structural form of causality…
 

II
 

…the discredit into which interpretation has fallen is thus at one with the disrepute visited on allegory itself. …empiricism, the mirage of an utterly nontheoretical practice, is a contradiction in terms; that even the most formalizing kinds of literary or textual analysis carry a theoretical charge whose denial unmasks it as ideological. … We will now…move on to the even more outrageous assertion that the working theoretical framework or presuppositions of a given method are in general the ideology which that method seeks to perpetuate.
 

59
 

… the older New Criticism presupposes a specific “vision” or “theory” of history. …ethical thought projects as permanent features of human “experience,” and thus as a kind of “wisdom” about personal life and interpersonal relations, what are in reality the historical and institutional specifics of a determinate type of group solidarity or class cohesion.
 

n36 “Metaphysics” and “humanism” are the negative critical categories of the Derridean and Althusserian groups respectively, explicitly ranged by each under the more global materialist category of “idealism.”
 

60
 

…temptation of ethics to recontain itself by assigning hostile and more properly political impulses to the ultimate negative category of ressentiment.
 

…only the dialectic provides a way for “decentering” the subject concretely, and for transcending the “ethical” in the direction of the political and the collective.
 

61
 

… philosophical systems or positions in recent times have in one way or another projected a hermeneutic which is specific to them.
 

…psychoanalysis, which may indeed lay claim to the distinction of being the only really new and original hermeneutic developed since the great patristic and medieval system of the four senses of scripture.
 

62
 

…conditions of possibility of psychoanalysis become visible…only when you begin to appreciate the extent of the psychic fragmentation since the beginnings of capitalism, with its systematic quantification and rationalization of experience, its instrumental reorganization of the subject just as much as of the outside world…rationalization –Weber’s term, which Lukacs will strategically retranslate as reification in History and Class Consciousness… as sight becomes a separate activity in its own right, it acquires new objects that are themselves the products of a process of abstraction and rationalization which strips the experience of the concrete of such attributes as color, spatial depth, texture, and the like, which in their turn undergo reification. The history of forms evidently reflects this process…
 

65
 

The center around which the Freudian interpretive system turns is not sexual experience but rather wish-fulfillment, or its more metaphysical variant, “desire”…
 

… Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values” and also Weber’s own notion of a “value-free science” (commonly misconstrued as neutral scientific “objectivity”) constitute so many attempts to project some Archimedean standpoint outside of social life, from which the inner-worldly values of the latter might be abstracted and studied… For with the coming of secular society and the desacralization of life paths and of the various rituals of traditional activity, with the new mobility of the market… (on which the central discovery of the labor theory of value was itself dependent), it became possible of the first time to separate the unique quality and concrete content of a particular activity form its abstract organization or end… Freud’s conception of wish-fulfillment is a late stage in this process of abstraction (and that it has as epistemological predecessors the Marxian theory of labor power, and the subsequent Nietzschean and Weberian conceptions of value….
 

66
 

The Lacanian rewriting of Freud should not be read as a mere variant on that Freudian hermeneutic, but rather a substantial and reflexive shift from the Freudian proposition about the nature of the dynamics of the subject (wish-fulfillment) to the interrogation of that problematic itself, foregrounding the category of the subject and studying the process whereby this psychic reality (consciousness)—as well as its buttressing ideologies and illusions (the feeling of personal identity, the myth of the ego or the self, and so forth)…
 

67
 

…transformed into an allegory whose master narrative is the story of desire itself, as it struggles against a repressive reality, convulsively breaking through the girds that were designed to hold it in place or, on the contrary, succumbing to repression and leaving the dreary wasteland of aphanasis behind it.
 

…a whole new mythic narrative… whose great narrative events—repression and revolt—ought to be congenial to a Marxist perspective…
 

68
 

From the point of view of interpretation… desire is always outside of time, outside of narrative: it has no content, it is always the same in its cyclical moments of emergence, and the event in question takes on historicity only to the degree that the context of the explosion, the nature of that particular and historical repressive apparatus, knows specification.
 

…the need to transcend individualistic categories and modes of interpretation is in many ways the fundamental issue for any doctrine of the political unconscious, of interpretation in terms of the collective or associative. We will do so, however, by shifting from the Freudian hermeneutic to...the archetypal system of Northrop Frye… the function of culture explicitly in social terms.
 

69
 

…if we are to begin to grasp the degree to which capitalism has effectively dissolved all the older forms of collective relations…
 

… Frye’s work comes before us as a virtual contemporary reinvention of the four-fold hermeneutic associated with the theological tradition.
 

… trajectory of our discussion, from Freud to Northrop Frye, is an emblematic one…
 

70
 

…with Frye, we see literature as a weaker form of myth or a later stage of ritual, to conclude that in that sense all literature, no matter how weakly, must be informed by what we have called a political unconscious, that all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community.
 

71
 

… strategic occasion on which to interrogate religious hermeneutics in general.
 

…Frye’s restructuring… “Theory of Symbols” rewrites the older fourfold scheme as four “phases”: the Literal and Descriptive; the Formal; the Mythical or Archetypal; and the Anagogic.
 

“The archetypal critic studies the poem as part of poetry, and poetry as part of the total human imitation of nature that we call civilization. Civilization os not merely an imitation of nature, and it is impelled by the force that we have just called desire. . . . [Desire] is neither limited to nor satisfied by objects, but is the energy that leads human society to develop its own form. Desire in this sense is the social aspect of what we met on the literal level as emotion, an impulse towards expression which would have remained amorphous if the poem had not liberated it…”
 

“The efficient cause of civilization is work, and poetry in its social aspect has the function of expressing, as a verbal hypothesis, a vision of the goal of work and the forms of desire.” Anatomy 105
 

… this level—which the medieval theorists called the anagogic… For Frye, this final level of meaning begins to emerge only when beyond the natural or inner-worldly archetypes of community we glimpse the human body itself…
 

“When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained… the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate.” Anatomy 119
 

73
 

This is not to suggest that a Marxian hermeneutic can do without the symbolism and the impulse of libidinal transfiguration. Indeed, radical politics has traditionally alternated between these two classical options or ‘levels,” between the image of the triumph of the collectivity and that of the liberation of the “soul” or “spiritual body”; between a Saint-Simonian vision of social and collective engineering and a Fourieresque Utopia of libidinal gratification; between a 1920s Leninist formulation of communism as “the soviets plus electrification” and some more properly Marcusean 1960s celebration of an instinctual “body politic.” The problem is not merely that of the respective priorities of these two ‘levels,” not merely interpretive and hermeneutic, but also practical and political, as the fate of the countercultural movement of the 1960s demonstrates.
 

… Frye’s own allegorical method… terminological uncertainties… something like an implicit self-critique.

 

74

 

…four levels of scripture, the third, that of the individual soul is designated as the moral level, while it is the fourth or last level—which embraces the whole history of the human race and the last judgment—that is termed the anagogical one. In Frye’s appropriation of this system, the terms have been reversed… Mythical or Archetypal level is that of the community—what the medieval exegetes called the anagogical—and is now positioned as a third level or phase subsumed under the final one, that of the libidinal body (which Frye, however, designates as the Anagogical level).

 

n55 “Our fourth level, the study of myths and of poetry as a technique of social communication, is the third medieval level of moral and tropological meaning” Anatomy 116
 

[My] social hermeneutic will, on the contrary, wish to keep faith with its medieval precursor in just this respect, and must necessarily restore a perspective in which the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community.
 

…the individual body, like the individual “subject,” is a decentered “effect,” …to which the individual organism, caught in the ceaseless chain of the generations and the species, cannot, even in the most desperate Renaissance or Neoplatonic visions of hermaphroditism (or in their contemporary counterpart, the Deleuze-Guattari “bachelor machine”), lay claim.
 

75
 

…the present book…seeks to argue the perspectives of Marxism as a necessary precondition for adequate literary comprehension… ultimate semantic precondition… three concentric frameworks… of political history…of society… less diachronic… of history now conceived in its vastest sense of the sequence of modes of production and …human social formations…
 

n56 …phenomenological concept of “horizon” … Gadamer’s  …Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizons). …Sinn and Bedeutung … intrinsic “meaning” and what he is pleased to call our “ethical” evaluation of its “significance” …corresponds to the traditional Marxist distinction between science and ideology…
 

102
 

… “inevitable” … History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation or as one master code among many others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events; it is therefore a narrative category in the enlarged sense of some properly narrative political unconscious... a retextualization of History which does not propose the latter as some new representation or “vision,” some new content, but as the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an “absent cause.” Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.