I’m probably one of maybe a few dozen people who remembers Louis Althusser’s critique of “historicism” in Marxism—what Althusser was targeting (as a way, probably, of gaining some distance from Stalinism) was literary and cultural theorists like, for example, Lucian Goldman, who lined up specific historical periods or classes with specific historical forms as in, for example, “the rise of the bourgeoisie lead to the emergence of the novel as the dominant literary form.” Althusser was opposing the notion that an element of the “superstructure” was a direct “expression” of some element of the “infrastructure” for a few reasons, one of them being that this approach generated the illusion of uniform progress toward pre-determined and predictable ends. Althusser was right, because there is no direct “transmission” of the “content” of one level to the “form” of another, but his critique also led to years of convoluted debates about how, then, to make the Marxist terminology suited to the “late capitalist” reality. I’m reminding and warning myself in particular here, because I’m going to do some layering myself here by introducing the “originary grammar” I developed (not to perfection by any means) in
Back to Grammar
Back to Grammar
Back to Grammar
I’m probably one of maybe a few dozen people who remembers Louis Althusser’s critique of “historicism” in Marxism—what Althusser was targeting (as a way, probably, of gaining some distance from Stalinism) was literary and cultural theorists like, for example, Lucian Goldman, who lined up specific historical periods or classes with specific historical forms as in, for example, “the rise of the bourgeoisie lead to the emergence of the novel as the dominant literary form.” Althusser was opposing the notion that an element of the “superstructure” was a direct “expression” of some element of the “infrastructure” for a few reasons, one of them being that this approach generated the illusion of uniform progress toward pre-determined and predictable ends. Althusser was right, because there is no direct “transmission” of the “content” of one level to the “form” of another, but his critique also led to years of convoluted debates about how, then, to make the Marxist terminology suited to the “late capitalist” reality. I’m reminding and warning myself in particular here, because I’m going to do some layering myself here by introducing the “originary grammar” I developed (not to perfection by any means) in