4. comment on the political implications of the death of the author.

20

Death of the Author Many of Barthess works focus on literature. However, Barthes denied being a literary critic, because he did not assess and provide verdicts on works. Instead, he interpreted their semiotic significance. Barthess structuralist style of literary analysis has influenced cultural studies, to the chagrin of adherents of traditional literary approaches. One notable point of controversy is Barthess proclamation of the death of the author. This death is directed, not at the idea of writing, but at the specifically French image of the auteur as a creative genius expressing an inner vision. He is opposing a view of texts as expressing a distinct personality of the author. Barthes vehemently opposes the view that authors consciously create masterpieces. He maintains that authors such as Racine and Balzac often reproduce emotional patterns about which they have no conscious knowledge. He opposes the view that authors should be interpreted in terms of what they think theyre doing. Their biographies have no more relevance to what they write than do those of scientists. In The Death of the Author, Barthes argues that writing destroys every voice and point of origin. This is because it occurs within a functional process which is the practice of signification itself. Its real origin is language. A writer, therefore, does not have a special genius expressed in the text, but rather, is a kind of craftsman who is skilled in using a particular code. All writers are like copywriters or scribes, inscribing a particular zone of language. The real origin of a text is not the author, but language. If the writer expresses something inner, it is only the dictionary s/he holds ready-formed. There is a special art of the storyteller to translate linguistic structures or codes into particular narratives or messages. Each text is composed of multiple writings brought into dialogue, with each code it refers to being extracted from a previous culture. Barthess argument is directed against schools of literary criticism that seek to uncover the authors meaning as a hidden referent which is the final meaning of the text. By refusing the author (in the sense of a great writer expressing an inn er brilliance), one refuses to assign an ultimate meaning to the text, and hence, one refuses to fix its meaning. It becomes open to different readings. According to Barthes, the unity of a text lies in its destination not its origin. Its multiplicity is focused on the reader, as an absent point within the text, to whom it speaks. The writer and reader are linguistic persons, not psychological persons. Their role in the story is defined by their coded place in discourse, not their specific traits.

A text cannot have a single meaning, but rather, is composed of multiple systems through which it is constructed. In Barthess case, this means reading texts through the signs they use, both in their structure in the text, and in their wider meanings. Literature does not represent something real, since what it refers to is not really there. For Barthes, it works by playing on the multiple systems of language-use and their infinite transcribability their ability to be written in different ways. The death of the author creates freedom for the reader to interpret the text. The reader can recreate the text through connecting to its meanings as they appear in different contexts. In practice, Barthess literary works emphasise the practice of the craft of writing. For instance, Barthess structuralist analysis of Sade, Fourier and Loyola emphasises the structural characteristics of their work, such as their emphasis on counting and their locations in self-contained worlds. He views the three authors as founders of languages (logothetes). The Structure of Narrative In Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, Barthes explores the structure of narrative, or storytelling, from a structuralist perspective. Narrative consists of a wide variety of genres applied to a wide variety of substances for example, theatre, film, novels, news stories, mimes, and even some paintings. We can see what Barthes terms narrative whenever something is used to tell a story. People using this theory will often refer to the way people live their lives as narratives, and some will talk about a right to tell our own story. Narrative is taken to be humanly universal every social group has its own narratives. Barthes models the analysis of narrative on structuralist linguistics. The structure or organisation is what is most essential in any system of meaning. The construction of a narrative from different statements is similar to the construction of a sentence from phonemes. Barthes argues that there are three levels of narrative: functions, actions, and narration. Each has meaning only in relation to the next level. Functions refer to statements in narratives. Every statement or sentence in a novel, for example, has at least one function. Barthes gives examples like: James Bond saw a man of about fifty and Bond picked up one of the four receivers. For Barthes, every statement has a particular role in the narrative there are no useless statements, no noise in the information-theory sense. But statements vary in their importance to the narrative, in how closely or loosely it is tied to the story. Some are functions in the full sense, playing a direct role in the story. For instance, a character buys a gun so s/he can use it later in the story. The phone

rings, and Bond picks it up this will give him information or orders which will move the action forward. Others are indices they index something which establishes the context of the story. They might, for instance, convey a certain atmosphere. Or they might say something about the psychology or character of an actor in the story. The four receivers show that Bond is in a big, bureaucratic organisation, which shows that he is on the side of order. The man of about fifty indicates an atmosphere of suspicion: Bond needs to establish who he is and which side he is on. Among the former the true functions these can be central aspects of the narrative, on which it hinges (cardinal points or nuclei), or they can be complementary (catalysers). To be cardinal, a function needs to open or close a choice on which the development of the story depends. The phone ringing and Bond answering are cardinal, because the story would go differently if the phone didnt ring or Bond didnt answer. But if Bond moved towards the desk and answered the phone, the phrase moved towards the desk is a catalyser, because it does not affect the story whether he did this or not. Stories often contain catalysers to provide moments of rest from the risky decision-points. Barthes sees true functions as forming pairs: one initiates a choice and the other closes it. These pairs can be close together, or spread out across a story. The choice is opened by the phone ringing, and closed by Bond answering it. Indices are also divided into true indices, which index things like an actors character or an atmosphere, and informants, which simply identify something or situate it in time and space. A characters age is an example of an informant. True indices are more important to the story than informants. All moments of a narrative are functional, but some more so than others. Functions and indices are functional in different ways. Cardinal functions and true indices have greater functionality than catalysers and informants. At root, however, a narrative is structured through its nuclei. The other functional elements are always expansions on the nuclei. It is possible, as in folk-tales, to create a narrative consisting almost entirely of nuclei. Functions are arranged into narratives by being attached to agents characters in the story who engage in actions. Every narrative necessarily has agents. The actions of an agent connect the nuclei of the narrative to particular articulations of praxis desire, communication and struggle. The third level, narration, occurs between the narrator (or writer) and the reader. The narrator compiles the narrative in a way which is addressed to the reader, and produces the reader as a particular position in the narrative. The positions of narrator and reader are clearest when a writer addresses a factual statement directly to the

reader: Leo was the owner of the joint. Narrator and reader are largely empty positions within the narrative. Narratives also have a kind of logical time which is interior to them and is barely connected to real time. This logical time is constructed by the series of nuclei (which open and close choices), and their separation by other nuclei and by subsidiary elements. It is held together by the integration of the pairs of nuclei. Narratives implicitly receive their meaning, however, from a wider social world. Barthes maintains that narratives obtain their meaning from the world beyond them from social, economic and ideological systems. Barthes criticises the narratives of his day for trying to disguise the process of coding involved in constructing a narrative. As in Mythologies, he again argues that this naturalisation of signs, and denial of the process of social construction of meaning, is specifically bourgeois. Both bourgeois society and its mass culture demand signs which do not look like signs. They are reluctant to declare their codes. Narrative also contains other potentials. Like dreaming, it alters the familiar in ways which show different possibilities. Although what is known or experienced is constantly re-run through narratives, the narratives do not simply repeat what is re-run through them. They open a process of becoming. In other words, things can run differently when run through narrative. Narrative shows that other meanings are possible. Familiar things can be given different meanings. What happens in narrative has no referent. It doesnt refer to something in the real world. Rather, what happens in narrative is language itself the celebration of its many possibilities. However, it is also closely connected to monologue (which follows in personal development from dialogue). Barthes is highly critical of realist and naturalist views of writing. For Barthes, literature is built on emptiness: it represents something which is not really there. All the arts of fiction, including theatre, cinema and literature, are constructed based on signs. They function by the suspension of disbelief. They function by calling certain desires or structures into play, causing people to feel various emotions. They are not representations of reality, but rather, a way to induce feelings in the audience. The attempt to convince the audience that the story is real is a way of reproducing the naturalisation of signs. A supposedly realistic or naturalistic art or literature never really tells it like it is. It represents through a set of conventional signs which stand for reality. Barthes criticises those who believe authors imitate an existing reality (a practice known as mimesis). He is in favour of an emphasis on the creation of a discursive world (semiosis) rather than mimesis. Hence his interest in Sade, Fourier and Loyola. Instead

of conventional views of the world, alternative presentations can denaturalise the present and provide utopian alternatives. Barthes also criticises the idea of clarity in literature, for similar reasons. Clarity is simply conventional. It is relative to a particular regime of signs. It amounts to a criterion of familiarity. Therefore, it has conservative effects. Barthes views clarity as a class attribute of the bourgeoisie, used to signify membership of this class (this contrasts sharply with the more common claim in activist circles that speech should be clear so as to be working-class or inclusive). However, this is not strictly an expressive view either. The actor or author doesnt necessarily induce sympathy for their own feelings. Such an effect can amount to confusing art with reality. Instead, the actor, author and audience all know its fiction. In some contexts, such as theatre, wrestling, and (in Barthess view) Japanese culture, performance or artifice is recognised for what it is. It is not taken to be natural or real. In these contexts, signs have no content. Their operation serves to show the existence and functioning of signs. It also allows an expressive use of signs, to stand for particular emotions. In Rhetoric of the Image, Barthes discusses the different levels of meaning in a Panzani advert. Firstly, theres a linguistic message, which has the usual denoted and connoted levels. Secondly, theres a connotation, established by juxtaposition, associating the brand with freshness and home cooking. Thirdly, theres the use of colours and fruits to signify Italianicity, the mythical essence of Italy. Fourthly, the processed product is presented as if equivalent to the surrounding unprocessed items. These signifiers carry euphoric values connected to particular myths. According t o Barthes, at least the third of these meanings is quasi-tautological. The language of images is constructed in particular zones or lexicons. Each of the connoted meanings refers to a specific body of social practice which certain readers will receive, and others may not. For instance, it mobilises ideas from tourism (Italianicity) and art (the imitation of the style of a still life painting). Often the same signifieds are carried by text, images, acting and so on. These signifieds carry a particular dominant ideology. A rhetoric of the image deploys a number of connotative images to carry messages. All images are polysemous they can be read in a number of ways. In an image such as this, language is used both explicitly and implicitly to guide the selection of meanings. The text directs the reader as to which meanings of the image to receive. Barthes thus suggests that texts have a repressive value relative to images: they limit what can be seen. It is in this limitation that ideology and morality function. Ideology chooses among multiple meanings which ones can be seen, and limits the shifting flow of signification which would otherwise happen. Euphoria and Affect

Euphoria has both positive and negative meanings in Barthess work. As a negative term, it refers to the enjoyment of a closed system or familiar meaning which is induced by mythical signifiers. For instance, the fashion system is euphoric because its persistence as a system defies death. People can partake in a system of meanings which seems eternal, and thereby experience some of its illusory universality as euphoria. Myth provides euphoria because it provides a sense that something is absolutely clear. It aims for a euphoric security which comes with enclosing everything in a closed system. Tautology, for instance, gives someone the minor satisfaction of opting for a truth-claim without the risk of being wrong (because nothing substantive has been said). This can be compared to Negris argument in Time for Revolution that systemic closure yields a certain type of enjoyment. On the other hand, it can also signify an experience of fullness arising from actually escaping the regime of myths. In The Third Meaning, Barthes analyses Sergei Eisensteins films, suggesting the presence of what he terms an obtuse meaning alongside the explicit denotative and connotative meanings. These images simply designate an emotion or disposition, setting in motion a drift in meaning. They dont represent anything. They are momentary, without development or variants. They have a signifier without a signified. They thus escape the euphoria of closed systems, pointing to something beyond. Indeed, an obtuse meaning is not necessarily visible to all readers. Its appearance is subjective. It is permanently empty or depleted (it remains unclear how this positive empty signifier relates either to the mana-words of Mythologies, or to Laclaus rather different use of the same term). It can also serve as part of mythical schemes. For instance, ,moral indignation can function as a pleasant emotion. The obtuse meaning is not present in the system of language, though it is present in speech. It almost sneaks into speech, on the back of language. It appears as a rare and new practice counterposed to the majority practice of signification. It seems like a luxury: expenditure without exchange. And it seems to belong, not to todays politics, but to tomorrows. Barthes sees such facets as undermining the integration of characters, turning them into nubs of facets. In other words, the molar self of the character (who, in Mythologies, is connected to social decomposition and misrepresentation) is replaced by a different kind of connection which is, perhaps, directly lived and connected to the world, rather than projecting a literary figure onto it. It has been read in terms of a moment of emotion prior to thought. I think it might be better linked to Deleuzes idea of the time-image: the obtuse image is a momentary image which expresses the contingency of becoming. Barthes suggests that the obtuse image is carnivalesque, and that it turns the film into a permutational unfolding, a flow of becoming in the system of signs. Writerly Reading: S/Z

In S/Z, a text devoted primarily to the study of Balzacs short story Sarrasine, Barthes proposes a distinction between two types of texts. A text is writerly if it can be written or rewritten today. A writerly text is constructed in such a way as to encourage readers to reuse and reapply it, bringing it into new combinations with their own meanings. It is celebrated because it makes the reader a producer, not a consumer, of a text. The writerly value restores to each person the magic of the signifier. The writerly text is inseparable from the process of writing, as an open-ended flow which has not yet been stopped by any system (such as ideology or criticism). It is necessarily plural. This is a kind of plurality distinguished from liberalism: it does not acknowledge partial truths in different positions, but insists on difference as such. Difference constantly returns through texts, which re-open the network of language at a different point. Barthes counterposes this view to an essentialist or Platonic view in which all texts approximate a model. For Barthes, texts instead offer entrances into the network of language. They do not offer a norm or law. Rather, it offers a particular perspective constructed of particular voices, fragments of texts, and semiotic codes. Texts have only a contingent unity which is constantly rewritten through its composition in terms of codes. A writerly text should have many networks which interact without any of them dominating the others. The readerly, in contrast, reduces a text to something serious, without pleasure, which can only be accepted or rejected. A readerly text is so heavily attached to a particular system of meanings as to render the reader passive. It is a reactive distortion of the writerly through its ideological closure. Readerly texts must, however, contain a limited or modest plural in order to function. This limited plurality of the text is created through its connotations. There are also writerly and readerly styles of reading texts, depending whether one seeks predetermined meanings in it, or seeks instead to inscribe it in new ways. Instead of treating a text as a single phenomenon which represents something, Barthes proposes to examine a text through the plural signs it brings together. Instead of giving a unified image of a text, it decomposes it into component parts. Such a reading uses digressions to show that the structures of which the text is woven can be reversed and rearranged. Barthes calls this style of reading starring of a text. It cuts the text up into blocks of signification, breaching its smooth surface and especially its appearance of naturalness. It interrupts the flow of the text so as to release the perspectives within it. Each block is treated as a zone, in which the movement of meanings can be traced. The goal of this exercise is to hear one of the voices of the text.

Readers should reconstitute texts as plural. Among other things, this means that forgetting meanings is a necessary part of reading. It ensures that multiple readings remain possible, and therefore, that signifiers are allowed to shift or move. One cant reduce all stories to a single structure, because each text carries a particular difference. This kind of difference is not an irreducible quality, but the constant flow of language into new combinations. Analysing the function of each text restores it to this flow of difference. He also calls for re-reading, as a means to avoid repetition and to remove texts from linear time (before or after) and place them in mythical time. Re-reading is no longer consumption, but play, directed against both the disposability of texts and their distanced analysis, and towards the return of difference. It helps create an experience of plural texts. In this text, Barthes criticises many of his earlier views. He now claims that connotation is ever-present in readerly texts (though not in some modern texts). There is no underlying denotative layer. Denotation is simply the most naturalised layer of connotation. Further, connotation carries voice into the text, weaving a particular voice into the code. The writer, here, has more of a role than Barthes previously allowed. Writing brings in historical context through connotation. The text as expression for the reader is also criticised. Readers are also products of prior texts, which compose subjectivity as subject-positions in narratives. Reading is itself a form of work. The content of this work is to move, to shift between different systems or flows which have no ending-point. The work is shown to exist only by its functioning: it has no definite outcome. To read is to find meanings within the endless flow of language. We might think of it as creating particular, temporary points or territories by finding resonances within a field which is like an ocean or a desert.

3. Examine the nature of the revolution in women's education proposed by Mary Wollstonecraft. 20

The A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft is a central text in the history of feminist theory, which till date continues to be an important reference for any understanding of feminist thought and activism at the end of the eighteenth century. It essay also functioned as a remarkable intervention in a field of intellectual debate dominated at the time almost entirely by men.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women is in a large part structured as a response to several works on women education and female conduct written by men during the latter half of the 18th century. Of these the best-known and most influential was Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Emile or On Education. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft writes against a conception of women and femininity as defined primarily by the ability to arouse male sexual desire deprive us of souls and insinuate that we are beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the sense of man.. Her vision of womens emancipation from the slavery to which the pride and sensuality of man and their short-sighted desire has subjected them hinges on a notion of natural freedom. From Wollstonecrafts perspective, women were to be governed by reasonable laws rather than the despotism that has characterized mens treatment of them; they might accede to that state of liberty and moral dignity which is so often denied to them the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form of the heart.to enable the individual to achieve such habits of virtue as will render it independent. Thus, she is harshly critical of the intense sexualization of femininity that she sees Rousseau among others as undertaking, for it is this association of women with bodily dependence that prevents them, according to Wollstonecraft, from acquiring vigour of intellect and rational thought. Wollstonecrafts analysis of gender relations is based on a critique of the way in which womens roles are culturally constructed to hinder their ability to become fully rational and autonomous moral individuals. A Vindication of the Rights of Women takes a historicist perspective on female education and what might be termed a Universalist approach to social theory. Finally, Wollstonecraft demands that men grant women the possibility to prove themselves as individuals blessed with the qualities of reason and independent thought. As she puts it, It is time to effect a revolution of female manners time to restore to them their lost dignity make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. A keen and vital concern with education, especially of girls and women, runs throughout Mary Wollstonecrafts writing and remains a dominant theme to the abrupt end of her career. A Vindication of the Rights of Women begins as a plea for the equal education of women and includes an ambitious and far-sighted proposal for a national schools system. Education was critically important to Wollstonecraft both as a liberal reformer and as a radical theorist and proponent of womens rights. A broad spectrum of reformist writers and activists from conservatives wishing to shore up the status quo to Jacobins wishing to overturn it saw education as a, if not the, key locus for promoting social stability or engineering social revolution. According to associationist psychology, influentially applied to schooling and pedagogy in Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and subscribed to by nearly every important writer on education in Wollstonecrafts time, childhood was the crucial period for the formation of individuals and hence of social groups. As Wollstonecraft herself writes, upon later character and the associations built over the course of childhood can seldom be disentangled by reason in later life. Not simply the consciously held ideals but the

unconscious habits, prejudices, and character traits of men and women are established during childhood. The efforts of parents and teachers cannot do everything, following associationistic logic, since dominant social manners and institutions have a large formative effect in themselves. Yet education could at least do something to form rational and virtuous moral subjects who could then, in turn, help set a better social tone and establish more progressive social institutions. In contrast to skeptics like Anna Barbauld, who noted the contingencies and uncontrollable aspects of childs early environment, most liberal and radical intellectuals of the time viewed education as the cornerstone of any social reform. This was especially true for Dissenting intellectuals, non -conformist Protestants excluded from the educational institutions (including English Universities) under official Anglican control. Left to build their own network of schools and academicians, with considerable success, Dissenters has a practical stake as well as a theoretical and political interest in education. Although Wollstonecraft came from an Anglican family, her intellectual career brought her into sustained contact with Dissenting culture, from Richard Prices circle at Newington Green to Joseph Johnsons celebrated group in London, and her though on education and childhood shows a great deal of coherence with leading non-conformist ideals. If education was preeminent in forming individual subjects, it was equally powerful, Wollstonecraft eventually argues, to deform the subjective lives of women. She came to see the history of female education as a virtual conspiracy of male educators and writers seeing to render women weaker and less rational than they would otherwise have become women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to acquire what really deserves the name of virtue; Men indeed appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner, when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood. For the amelioration of womens abject social condition, then, and for the rise of a revolutionary generation of rational, free-thinking, independent women, educational reform was crucial. Moreover, women could argue from their traditional role as nurturers and early educators of children for a sounder and more rational education. If women were to be wholly or largely consigned to the domestic sphere, that is, they could make this domestic form of subjection the very ground for educational reform, since only a thoughtful, well-informed strong mother could be expected to provide for her children a truly adequate rearing and education How then can the great art of pleasing be said to be a necessary study? Such arguments, made by Wollstonecraft in company with a wide range of female reformers from conservatives like Hannah Moore to radicals like Macaulay and Mary Hays, were inevitable double-edged. They challenged a key aspect of patriarchal domination the sub ordination of women through an invidious education meant to confine them to the domestic sphere through urging a revised conception of that very domestic role. Wollstonecraft argues for a reasoned assent to reigning social values, urging the development of a sound moral understanding over mindless cultivation of exterior accomplishments like drawing and music. Unfortunately, rote accomplishments, empty

manners, and vicious examples are what can be expected from most girls boarding. Wollstonecraft relentlessly attacks Rousseau for limiting a rational and sound education to boys, consigning girls to a subservient education for the body alone. Even in their traditional roles as mothers and nurturers, however, women require a much more substantial education. Wollstonecrafts radical re-conceptualization of the maternal role overlaps with the reformist agendas of most of the periods writers on education for women, but goes much further in demanding a complete overhaul of the false system recommended by all writers on female education and manners from Rousseau to Gregory. In place of incremental reforms, she calls for civil equality and economic independence, as well as an independence of mind scarcely to be expected from women taught to depend entirely on their husband. Moreover, the entire slate of negative virtues recommended throughout the conduct book manuals must be repudiated for their morally as well as physically debilitating effects, including the cardinal virtue of female modesty. Her uncompromising dismissal of uniquely feminine virtues which would facilitate her demonization in the reactionary period soon to follow allowed Wollstonecraft to revise the existing system of female socialization, from the cradle up. Wollstonecraft also extends her arguments to assert that women should exercise equal rights with men the public sphere and develops a critique of the structural inequalities of marriage. Marriage is based on an unequal contract, where the woman has the sole responsibility of appeasing her husband not with her morals or intellect, but with her charms only. When a women has only been taught to please, marriage which is supposed to eradicate the habitude of life can only serve to bring about monotony and bitterness or extra-marital affairs since the womens pleasing beauty cannot have much effect on the husbands heart, when they are seen everyday, when the summer is past and gone. However, although Wollstonecraft is a stem critic of actually existing marriages, she does not reject marriage as an institution altogether. Instead, she envisages a form of marriage that incorporates the major features of the classical notion of higher friendship such as equality, free choice, reason, mutual esteem and pro- found concern for one anothers moral character Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship. The classical ideal of higher friendship provides a suitable model for her liberal approach to marriage be- because it represents the paradigmatic rational, equal, and free relationship. In such relationships, individuals exchange some of their independence for interdependence and are united by bonds of deep and lasting affection, as well as respect for and appreciation of one anothers character and individuality. Wollstonecraft uses the idea that marriage should emulate many of the features of higher friendship to criticize the practices and values of romance and family life in eighteenth-century English society and to suggest a way in which marriage might be reconfigured to realize central liberal values. To recast marriage in this way means that Wollstonecraft is applying liberal values to the world of romantic love and family life. That she thinks about marriage in political, and specifically liberal, terms and recommends a model of marriage that emulates many of friendships salient features is an important feature of her work.

Mary Wollstonecrafts essay thus needs to be situated in a society in which liberal individualism was becoming the dominant ideological formation of (male) personhood and social organization, what she uncovered was the systemic inequality of women in all areas of life the family, work, culture, economics, the law, education as well as inconsistency of the ideological positions that held this inequality in place. A Vindication of the Rights of Women was a response to that inequality. She examines the naturalness of womens inequality and discovers that it s not in fact natural at all natural indeed was a highly ideologically loaded word. Womens inequality, Wollstonecraft argued is socially constructed to shore up the position of the privileged liberal-individualist male. She argues that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched, by a variety of concurring causes, amongst which are inadequate parenting, bad education, the lack of property rights and the exclusion from the political sphere, as well as the negative effects of literary-cultural traditions the ideology of romantic love which makes women mere creatures of sentiment, and bad novels which reproduce a false picture of reality rather than an intelligent analysis of it. A small, but important example of her analysis is from her discussion of Dr. Gregorys A Fathers Legacy to his Daughters (1774), a conduct manual which focused on proper feminine behaviour. To quote Wollstonecraft, he advises them to cultivate a fondness of dress, he asserts is natural to them. I am unable to comprehend what either he or Rousseau meant, when they frequently use this indefinite term. She argues that if something is natural, then one will do it naturally, without the advice to cultivate the position advocated. If the fondness of dress is not a natural attribute of women, why should they be encouraged to cultivate it? The answer the love of power comes from the larger context of the book in which Wollstonecraft suggests that while women are denies other forms of power (political, educational legal) they will make use of whatever power left to them: in particular their sexual power to attract men because they are aught, and have learned their lesson well, that they can only draw power from sexual relationships rather than having any autonomous potency of their own. This sexualization of femininity, noted also by de Beauvoirs comment that women are often designated the sex, supports male privilege in two distinct ways: firstly it shores up a position that emphasizes the attractiveness of masculinity and its potency; secondly, it keeps women actually weak, while pretending to offer them (very limited) power. Dr. Gregory and similar male conservatives of the eighteenth century insist that women are unequal to men. On the one hand, their liking for clothes is labeled natural; and the word natural is heavily invested with positive value. In culture, however, women are routinely disparaged for liking clothes too much, a trivial, unimportant preference. So when they are told to cultivate their natural taste for clothes, they can be once more labeled as trivial unimportant people, incapable of serious thought. Ideology has a circular logic, and it is difficult to break the spell. While Wollstonecraft herself could not have used the words ideology and liberal individualist, her critique demonstrates the construcedness of social formations, and he inherent bias towards masculinity in those constructions. What she seeks is to improve the situation of women within the existing structures of society. Her work suggests that

society is to blame for female oppression and for the general weakness of women. Women are not educated to do or know any better. Society has created wom ens foolishness and has then proceeded to blame women for their weakness, indeed has come to regard weakness as natural. For all her anger at the systemic oppression of women, however, Wollstonecraft is not quite a revolutionary writer, and her insights remain within the limits proposed by a liberal-individualist version of the world in the aftermath of the French Revolution. What she proposes is an extension of (male) individualist privilege to women. She does not propose to undo the very notion of privilege per se. The Vindication is basically a plea for bourgeois womans equality with the bourgeois man in the areas of educational, legal and political systems. It is all an attack on an ideal of femininity that constructs female inequality as natural. What is being demanded is therefore not so much a revolution towards an ideal of equality as a reapportioning of privilege to ensure that some (middle and upper class) women get some share of the spoils usually reserved to middle and upper class men. Her writings diagnose a social problem, but they articulate that problem within its own terms. The class, race and ethnic neglect of Wollstonecrafts writing have to be taken into consideration when thinking about the symptoms she uncovers and the diagnoses she produces in the Vindication, not least because of the significant space she apportions to literature in the formation of attenuated femininity she so deplores. In an age before widespread literacy, writing was necessarily addressed to the privileged few who could read. Her feminism is historically determined, depending on the ideological positions she deplores. Despite her bourgeois feminism, Mary Wollstonecrafts essay was instrumental in bringing in to the public sphere an initiation of intense debates on the question of emancipation of women. Her book was so popular that it had to be reprinted in the immediate next year.

5. What is Raymond William's contribution to the beginning of Cultural Studies at Birmingham? 2O

In this sense new museums as museums of identity would tend towards interdisciplinarity, relying on collective memory and heritage. Future centers for heritage and local development (already partially recognized through the concept of eco-muse- ums) should be, as heritage-focused actions with the goal to acknowledge, preserve and integrally interpret the identity of a territory or community, the most similar to the concept of museums that answers the needs and desires of a society and which at the same time confirms Williamss theory of culture as the study of relationships be- tween elements in a whole way of life, or a unified system of civilizational, cultural, natural,

social, economic and geographic values (2006: 39). In this manner the nine- teenthcentury concept of identity manipulation with the purpose of positioning cul- ture would be replaced by a strategy of identity management. In the end we have to ask ourselves: do we need museums as (heritage) institutions? In his analysis of culture Williams thinks that the tendency of many academic insti- tutions towards self-perpetuation and their insensitiveness to change is often a great obstacle on the path of societal development. Change is necessary, as is the establish- ment of new institutions, but only if we understand the process of selective tradition correctly. The role of museums in the community is multiple: social and cultural ben- efits (cultural centers, development of identity in the area they exist in, educational function), economic benefits (tourism), political benefits (developing a sense of belong- ing). Museums are places for appreciating change but also an instrument of develop- ment. They are necessary for the survival of identity, the preservation of collective memory and the development of the community they serve. Concerning the concep- tual crisis and great changes in heritage institutions, as well as the fact that museums are too important to be relevant only to science (ola, 2003: 20), cultural studies, as a multidisciplinary area that shifts boundaries and tries to understand how culture works in contemporary society, with the special interest in the significance of identi- ty and the multiple ways it is transferred and experienced, could be of great help on the museums way towards redefining their role and mission. In the last quarter of the last century great changes in museum practice and museums as cultural and heritage institutions took place. One of the more significant ones is the trend of the museum boom, i.e., the phenomenon of the progressive growth in the number of newly built and reconstructed museums. Data reveal that the growth rate was the largest in the period between the 1960s and the 1980s, when one to two museums a week used to be opened in the developed European countries, while the growth somewhat decreased in the 1990s.1 For example, in Great Britain museums spring up like mushrooms:2 from the 1860s to the present approximately 1600 museums were established, about 800 of them in the period between 1971 and 1987, which amounts to approximately a museum per week.3 In one year in Germany (1988-1989) 189 new museums were established, which is 3.5 museums per week on average!4 The trend of growth in the number of museums in Germany continued, and according to the European group on museum statistics5 in 1998 there was the total of 5755 museums, 6059 in 2002 and 6197 in 2007.6 The data on the growth of the number of world museums collections, increase in the number of employees, volunteers, museum friends, financial param- eters and, of course, the number of visitors, are equally fascinating. According to the Register of museums, galleries and collections of the Republic of Croatia 203 museums were registered in 2006.7 Regardless of the long and rich history (the Archeological Museum in Split was founded in 1820), Croatia lags behind the more developed coun- tries. The boom of museums in Croatia happened during the 1950s and in the pe- riod between 1960 and 1990, when about thirty new museums used to be established each decade. The political situation and periods of war (1900-1945 and during the Croatian War of Independence) had an adverse effect on the development of muse- um activities. Over the last several years the number of newly founded museums and initiatives for the founding of museums in Croatia is on the

increase, and the interest for establishing collections and museums stems mostly from local communities. What is the cause of the rapid increase in the number of museums and do they real- ly meet the needs they create? Regardless of the reasons for the increase, the impor- tance of museums in contemporary society is undeniable. Museums exist to ensure a better living and common good through their creative role in the society or, in short, to entertain and be useful. Considering the fact that culture in the wider, social sense of the word is still understood as an elitist product, it is necessary to redefine the position and significance of museums as non-profitable institutions in the service of so- ciety and their development within the overall cultural project. 8 a short introduction to the development and work of cultural studies With the foundation of the British Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Bir- mingham9 in 1964 the development of a new discipline began, with the goal to ana- lyze and acknowledge the role of culture in (initially British) history and the study of contemporary forms and manifestations of culture previously located outside the usu- al academic interest, on the margins of life, work and entertainment.10 The Ce nters most prominent representatives and associates, such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Richard Johnson, Stuart Hall, Charlotte Brunsdon, Meaghan Morris and others, directed their interests toward the area of popular culture, working class cul- ture, theories of gender and racial identities, cultures of travel and subcultural life- styles, investigating at the same time the relationship towards the audience and the locations of cultural production. The ultimate goal of cultural studies is, in short, to understand the changes taking place in contemporary culture as the projections of opposing models of representations and the diverse ways of life and opposing communicational strategies. Cultural studies distance themselves from the traditionally structured institutions, as they resist all three of the traditionally essential epistemological elements, namely discipline, object of research and research methods, although without intention to succeed or surpass individual scientific disciplines under the guise of interdisciplinarity. Cultural stud- ies doesnt have a unified discourse or method, which is not surprising, considering the fact that the only starting point of their analysis, culture, is multidiscursive, i.e. its meanings become active in accordance with its usages within different traditions, his- torical contexts and relations of knowledge and power. Therefore it is very difficult to give a one-dimensional definition that would cover the wide area of the practice of cultural studies as an area that approaches cultural artifacts more from the stand- point of literary analysis, as texts to be read, and not as objects to be classified. Tony Bennett, using the syntagm reformers science, suggests several definitions of cultural studies. Cultural studies deals with all those practices, institutions and sys-tems of classification through which there are inculcated in a population particular values, beliefs, competencies, routines of life and habitual forms of conduct (1998: 28). An all encompassing cultural studies work is marked by an interdisciplinary concern with the functioning of cultural practices in the contexts of relations of pow- er of different kinds (Bennett, 1998: 27). The forms of power within which culture is analyzed include relations of gender, class and race as well as those relations of colonialism and imperialism which exist between the whole populations of different territories (Bennett, 1998:28). It is visible from the mentioned definitions that cultural

studies engage in a continu- ous dialectic and permanent tension between the intercultural and academic life, an- alyzing new issues, models and ways of studying cultural practices and institutions in the context of various relations of power. How do museums as institutions function within contemporary society and culture, are they the indicators and mediators of con- temporary changes, do we need them at all as cultural (heritage) institutions and why do they spring up like mushrooms; these are the questions I will try to answer within the framework of cultural studies theory, by analyzing several selected texts by prom- inent literary cultural theorists. What seems relevant within this selection of texts is Williamss term of selective tradition, Halls analysis of identity from a deconstruction- ist standpoint and Bennetts principle of the multiplication of cultures utility. Culture in cultural studies Ideal, documentary and social definitions of culture Raymond Williams, one of the founding fathers of cultural studies in his glossary Keywords claims that [c]ulture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language (1983:87). Trying to define the complex term of culture, Wil - liams starts with its etymological roots in agriculture which at first meant something similar to cultivation.11 Williams leads us from the physical through the metaphysical extension of the meaning to the social and educational ones in the 17th and 18th cen- turies and to the aesthetical and civic definition of culture in the 19th and early 20th century, and finally to the postmodernist pluralization of the term culture and the recent usage of culturalism (2003:14). In further trying to define the concept of culture, Williams breaks down the term into three general categories: the ideal, documentary and social (2001: 57). The first one, ideal category defines culture as a state or process of human perfec- tion, in terms of certain absolute or universal values (Ibid.). According to this defi- nition culture is related to the ideal, the description of eternal values and universal human condition. According to the second, documentary definition, culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded, and the analysis of culture () is the activity of criticism, by which the nature of the thought and experience, the details of the language, form and convention in which these are active, are described and valued (Ibid.). The ex- amples of such activities are literary and art criticism which can be similar to the ideal analysis in discovering the best that has been thought and written in the world (Ibid.) or can, as a critical activity, be directed at the specific work being studied in the sense of explaining and valuing the work as its basic goal. It can include a type of historical criticism which, after the analysis, studies specific works in the context of social regions in which the works originated. The third, social definition of culture defines culture as the description of a par- ticular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour (Ibid.). This definition of culture encompasses the previously mentioned critical activity within the documentary analysis, but also includes the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture, as well as those elements of the way of life that are not culture at all: the organization of production, the struc- ture of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social rela- tionships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate (W illiams 2001:58). Williams concludes that each of the three definitions has its

value and role in the anal- ysis of culture as a whole, and that the focus on any of them independently is unac- ceptable; because, if the ideal definition is valuable due to its insistence on the wider, universal sense of searching for absolute values, it nevertheless sees mans ideal devel- opment as separated from satisfying their concrete material needs. Documentary defini- tion draws from material testimonies and finds values exclusively in written and visu- al sources and is thus separated from other areas of life. Social definition tends to see values and works as by-products, a passive reflection of real social interests. There- fore, in the interrelationship between culture and society, all activities and their in- terrelationships should be studied as equally valuable and as active reflections of hu- man energy. When Williamss texts12 was first published, museology was starting its attempts to de- fine itself as a scientific discipline. There was a view within museologic theory that its subject matter was the museum, its historical development and activities, while muse- ography in this view was the description of museum work techniques. Museum work was mostly directed at collecting and preserving objects and artwork and at museum architecture. It was only after 1976 that the museum object was acknowledged as an INDOC (information and documentation) object.13 Furthermore, the development of semiology and communication theories affected the understanding of the museum as a medium, and of the museum object as a sign which, apart from its physical dimen- sion, contains also an intellectual one and bears a certain meaning. When transferred into a new museum environment, every heritage object is extracted, selected from its reality in order to become its document. The documented value of an object is therefore the basis of museality which develops along the line of the relation between time and space. Furthermore, every musealia14 is a communication object which develops an information process in the relation between the society and space it lives in, while in the relationship between time and society it develops a communication process of transfer of the values and messages of heritage as another important museological function (Maroevi, 1998:142). Time, space and society become the three basic deter - minants through which the life of objects or the entire system of human heritage through the changes of their identity15 and role in the society can be observed. Structure of feeling and culture of the selective tradition The most difficult thing in studying past periods is, Williams thinks, to restore and experience that sense of the quality of life (p. 63), that common element, which is neither the character nor the pattern, but as it were the actual experience through which these are lived, and for this common element, which is the result of all the el- ements comprising the system, he proposes the term structure of feeling (2001: 64). The structure of feeling is not the structure that can be learnedevery generation has its own structure of feelings, along with the specific manner of communication in rela- tion to inherited values. Documentary culture, that is, the collected material testimo- nies of a period, can help us as bearers of different meanings settling in different pe- riods of human history. Considering the fact that we are familiar only with one part of tangible heritage, the one preserved through time, the interpretation of history takes place through the process of selection. The further attempt to define the complex term of culture involves the differentiation among the three levels of culture: lived culture, available exclusively to those living in the given time and space, recorded culture as the culture of a period,

which in- cludes art and everyday facts, and the culture of the selective tradition which as a fac- tor relates the lived culture and the culture of different periods. Williams thinks that [i]t is only in our own time and place that we can expect to know, in any substantial way, the general organization, and that, in the course of transfer to the present, cer tain elements get irretrievably lost or, if it is possible to reconstruct them, reconstruct- ed through abstraction (2006: 63). Thus, selective tradition through continuous selection, rejection and limitation al- lows for new reevaluations and interpretations of meaning. How can we define the culture of a period, taking into consideration this constant selection and re-selection of ancestors (Williams, 2006: 69)? The structure of feeling, the central concept of Wil- liamss theory, can be in a manner understood as the culture of a period. The struc- ture of feeling is an attempt to resolve the duality of culture which is simultaneously stable and defined in the sense that any structure is, but also vague and elusive, be- cause it refers not only to material, objective reality but also to lived experience, the most sensitive and least tangible aspects of our activities. It is in these examples of re- corded communication that the real feeling of life is contained, the fellowship that enables recognizability. Museums in the context of various relations of power Selective tradition is closely related to social development, through the process of his- torical change as well as in contemporary system of interests and values where a specif- ic social situation affects contemporary selection. The selection in a society is guid- ed by various special interests, including the class ones. So, cultural institutions often become the tool or strategy in the hands of the dominant forms of power. When Tony Bennett speaks of the multiplication of cultures utility,16 he defines the reforming strategies in the areas of culture and art in the British context of the second half of the 19th century. The opening of museums, art galleries and reading rooms across the country to the regular people, and not only to the privileged ones did not take place only due to aesthetic or educational purposes, but due to solving a series of so- cial problems. So museums became, among other things, instruments of civilizing the people. Thanks to the aesthetic features of culture and their influence on the behavior of those exposed to them, museums were meant to bring about social good through transforming workers into new prudential subjects. Within the framework of English utilitarian cultural reform, the exposure of workers to culture involved the need to lead them to be sober and prudent. Therefore, culture served as a civilizing agent and a resource for introducing the people to more prudent modes of behavior. The nineteenth-century principle of multiplying the utility of culture resulted in a two-way positioning of culture: the creation of a prudential subject through the civ- ilizing influence of culture that serves to reform a persons behavior and the devel- opment of new capillary systems for the distribution of culture, i.e. the utilization of culture and expansion of its scope throughout the social body. The new forms of governmental power within nineteenth-century cultural management reflected in the idea of the museum as an instrument of public education. The role of museums in contemporary society has changed significantly. While traditional museums were in the service of the ruling class as a strategy for establishing and regulating power, contemporary museums are slowly but safely becoming a corrective and adaptive social mechanism, a form of social intervention of a sort. Contemporary, postindustrial and consumer society needs such mechanisms in order to

secure the survival of identity and the continuity of collective memory. While muse- ums in their glorious past served to elevate and glorify the elite and produce rigid scientific information, contemporary museums have a mission to document, process and communicate all collected information from the past, thus taking part in the development and becoming a productive, vital social force. The new mission of the museum refers not only to the affirmation of culture, but also to boosting the quality of life in general and to contribute to a better, more comfortable and fun living. Raymond Williams, as was stated earlier, defined the theo ry of culture as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way if life (2006:63). For him, culture is a wider term, a common good, not an elite product. Cultural studies fight against the elitist definition of culture and in their discourse culture is ordinary, connect- ed to the whole way of life and everyday activities which also produce meaning and contain certain values. When Richard Johnson reflects on some arguments for and against the academ- ic codification of cultural studies in his text17, he asks: Is not the priority to become more popular rather than more academic? (2006:658). Because, the codification of knowledge stands in opposition to the openness and theoretical plurality of cultural studies, and cultural processes do not always correspond to the framework of academ- ic knowledge. Johnson concludes that [a]cademic knowledge forms (or some aspects of them) now look like part of the problem, rather that part of the solution, and the fundamental question is: what can be won from the academic concerns and skills to provide elements of useful knowledge? (Ibid). Although culture is the central focus of interest of cultural studies, it is not viewed as a whole, but within the context of so- cial power, where it produces constant analytical tensions through activating the po- litical within its own discourse. The dynamics of social power reflects in the opposed definitions of culture: high/low or elite/popular. On the one end of the dis - course Culture begins with a capital C, on the other end lie the symbolic practices and experiences of ordinary people. In his Notes on deconstructing the popular18 Stuart Hall draws attention to culture as a battlefield because active forms of popular culture are in constant opposition to-wards the dominant culture. In this battle there is no final winner, although domi- nant culture, constantly [tries] to disorganise and reorganise popular culture; to en- close and define its definitions and forms within a more inclusive range of dominant forms (1981:233). Popular culture19 is not to be viewed as inferior, less valuable in comparison to high culture, but it should be approached differently, with an appro- priate critical discourse. Culture is a complex, multidiscursive term, and considering the fact that a unique definition is not possible, the term often functions as an umbrella term because it covers all sorts of phenomena and symbolic practices. Because, if there exist soccer culture, transition culture, caf culture, culture of travel, food culture, polit- ical culture, sport culture, urban culture, then it is perfectly acceptable to estab- lish new types of museums that present and interpret different artifacts, phenomena or symbolic practices that arewell-liked by many people and that are recognized as elements of popular culture. Therefore, if, on one hand, there exist complex muse- ums of art, and on the other hand emerges the need for museums that deal not only with fine arts but also with everyday and contemporary cultural symbolic practic- es, in the sense that they educate and inform the public in a pleasant and entertain- ing way. The museum of today needs to include the whole public, all layers of socie- ty, not only the educated elite. The number of newly

established museums in Croatia has increased over the past sev- eral years20, while the cultural policy of the Republic of Croatia acknowledged the im- portance of museums as heritage and cultural institutions par excellence. The Draft of the Str ategy for cultural development of Croatia in the 21st century21 supports new, inventive museum types (The Museum of ties, Childrens Museum, Museum of Wom -en Painting, Vladimir Dodig Trokuts Anti-Museum), museum forms that value the relation between the environment and authentic artifact (memorial centers and col- lections), and special value is added to the development of eco-museums as the mod- el in which heritage of the local community is musealised in situ. One of the exam- ples of a contemporary, inventive museum form is the Croatian artistic project called Museum of broken relationships.22 Authors Vitica and Grubii envisaged it as an artis - tic concept based on the idea of preserving artifacts that testify of passed love rela- tionships. The main creator of the Museums exhibition is the audience itself which, donating its own exhibits, testifies of the specificity of the environment and mental- ity of individual intimate stories. This traveling museum was guest in several Euro- pean cities, Singapore and the USA, where it continued creating a space of protect - ed memory for preserving the emotional heritage of broken love relationships.23 Wishing to humor the audience and be as attractive as possible, contemporary muse- ums are frequently on the path to the world of entertainment and profit. In order to avoid the possible disneyfication of museums, museums have to take care of a good interpretation of its material and of sending the message to the public and defining its mission with the goal of the common good in mind. Deconstructionist approach to identity Terry Eagleton called the continuous dialectics and conflict over meaning in the contemporary (post)industrial society culture wars, and by this syntagm he implies the rift between Culture and culture, the struggle between custodians of the canon and devotees of difference (2000:51). Eagleton also thinks that cultural wars are conduct ed in three different ways: between culture as civility, culture as identity and culture as commercial or postmodern, and defines them in short as excellence, ethos and economics. Along with the interest for popular culture, the question of identity through three of its basic problems (those of class, gender and race) is a part of cultural issues studied within the discourse of cultural studies, as well as in other disciplines. Within cultural studies theory, Stuart Hall24 wonders why there is such large need for speculating about identity and analyses the term within a deconstructionist ap - proach. The deconstructionist viewpoint approaches key terms as under erasure, as no longer usable in their original and un-reconstructed form, but as constructed in or through diffrance, through the relationship with the Other and towards some- thing that is not, and is called a constitutive outside. The objective of the deconstruction- ist method is to show that categories and categorizations do not exist in absolute and en Painting, Vladimir Dodig Trokuts Anti-Museum), museum forms that value the relation between the environment and authentic artifact (memorial centers and col- lections), and special value is added to the development of eco-museums as the mod- el in which heritage of the local community is musealised in situ. One of the exam- ples of a contemporary, inventive museum form is the Croatian artistic project called Museum of broken

relationships.22 Authors Vitica and Grubii envisaged it as an artis - tic concept based on the idea of preserving artifacts that testify of passed love rela- tionships. The main creator of the Museums exhibition is the audience itself which, donating its own exhibits, testifies of the specificity of the environment and mental- ity of individual intimate stories. This traveling museum was guest in several Euro- pean cities, Singapore and the USA, where it continued creating a space of protect - ed memory for preserving the emotional heritage of broken love relationships.23 Wishing to humor the audience and be as attractive as possible, contemporary muse- ums are frequently on the path to the world of entertainment and profit. In order to avoid the possible disneyfication of museums, museums have to take care of a good interpretation of its material and of sending the message to the public and defining its mission with the goal of the common good in mind. Deconstructionist approach to identity Terry Eagleton called the continuous dialectics and conflict over meaning in the contemporary (post)industrial society culture wars, and by this syntagm he implies the rift between Culture and culture, the struggle between custodians of the canon and devotees of difference (2000:51). Eagleton also thinks that cultural wars are conduct ed in three different ways: between culture as civility, culture as identity and culture as commercial or postmodern, and defines them in short as excellence, ethos and economics. Along with the interest for popular culture, the question of identity through three of its basic problems (those of class, gender and race) is a part of cultural issues studied within the discourse of cultural studies, as well as in other disciplines. Within cultural studies theory, Stuart Hall24 wonders why there is such large need for speculating about identity and analyses the term within a deconstructionist ap - proach. The deconstructionist viewpoint approaches key terms as under erasure, as no longer usable in their original and un-reconstructed form, but as constructed in or through diffrance, through the relationship with the Other and towards some- thing that is not, and is called a constitutive outside. The objective of the deconstruction- ist method is to show that categories and categorizations do not exist in absolute and rigid meanings, that it is not possible to go unpunished taking over and transplanting terms from one discourse to another without at the same tame taking over their hy- potheses and effects. Identity is one of such terms operating under erasure in the interval between reversal and emergence; an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all (Hall, 1996:2). Therefore, Hall proposes the term identification, defining it as the process of articula - tion, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption, as a never-ending process based on the recognition of common origin or common feature shared with another person or group. Halls concept of identity does not imply an essentialist subject -root- ed order holding a predictable meaning, but a temporally and spatially contingent, intrinsically plural and contradictory, strategic and positional identity built and mul- tiplied through different intersecting discourses, practices and positions. Identity in the postmodern society is a continuous change and transformation. The dominant culture which is, according to Eagleton, a blend of excellence, ethos and economy, is increasingly subverting traditional identities. An increased growth of the number of museums over the last

several decades is nothing but an answer to the loss of identity in the global culture. People of modern society are forgetful. The excess of information causes the deletion of memories, and globalization causes the loss of roots, personality, originality, freedom, the loss of belonging. The power of the elec- tronic media (the internet, television, radio, mobile phones ), as well as the availa- bility of press and the quantity of books produced increase in geometrical progres- sion and cause crucial changes in the overall communication among the members of a culture, changes in the communication between the culture and the past (tradition) and the communication among simultaneously existing cultures. The emphasis is on the present (present in alternative movements and learning, hyperreality in every- day life), while the fear of future grows larger, and the past serves as a retreat from the present. In this sense museum is an antidote, a corrective and adaptive societal mechanism with the mission to defend identity and secure its continuity. Conclusion Museums as heritage institutions continuously select and interpret, transfer material and spiritual testimonies from a rich treasury of the past to the present, thus creat- ing a new culture, the culture of selective tradition. Hereby, every element studied is seen as active within real relations, taking into consideration the documentary, ideal and social analysis of culture as equally valuable. It is due to selective tradition that cultural institutions dealing with the preservation and transfer of tradition are ded- icated to tradition as a whole, not only to the selected parts that correspond to con- temporary interests and expectations, thus enabling the reevaluation and rediscov- ery of values of the previously discarded activities. During the first museum boom (second half of the 19th century) which was brought about by the idea of progress, industrial and technological development, urbaniza-tion, the new experience of time and space, but also as the motif of prestige and the support for the ruling elite, the role of museum represented the accumulation of en- cyclopedic knowledge and affirmation of national consciousness.25 The museum also served as a means for the multiplication of cultures utility, as a new form of govern- mental power and an instrument of public education. The second museum boom was caused by new circumstances in the world we live in over the last fifty years: infor- matization, the increase in the level of education, ideological and political uniformi- ty of the world, the processes of disculturation and commodification of culture, that is, turning culture into commodity, subject to market rules. The process of moderni- zation resulted in the growing distance between people and their past, which in turn caused the fear of identity loss, and the subsequent desire to regain it. The reasons for the rapid growth of the number of museums therefore have to be observed with- in a wider economic, political, and cultural context. The culture industry made culture the top priority of our time, and museums, as parts of the culture industry and participants in radical social changes, are forced to keep balance between the opposing poles of historical elitism and popular culture. Modern consumer society based on mass communication imposed new responsibili- ties on culture. The demands of the audience and users are increasingly moving to- wards an alliance between art and entertainment, towards the entertainment industry of the mass media which integrates art as well. Contemporary museums represent a place in which one can learn, play, paint, construct, experiment, eat, drink tea, chat, buy or otherwise spend ones free time usefully. The focus is on tactile

experience, attraction, interactive and multimedia approach to exhibiting. The door of the mu- seum is open, and the borders of activities are being increasingly stretched to include the user and the wider community. Considering the appearance in the second half of the twentieth century of phenomena and discourses previously not present within the framework of interest of humanist disciplines, which are defined as contemporary popular culture (daily newspaper, music, weekly magazines, television shows, lifestyles), a need emerged for establishing new types of museums or at least projects within the existing ones that try to answer complex questions of contemporary life. Parallel to the development of new types of museological activity goes the reconceptualization of traditional museums which embrace contemporary aspects of exhib - iting and presenting their material. The rapid increase in the number of museums is also the sign of a certain conceptu- al crisis because, regardless of the fact that museums spring up like mushrooms, it can be concluded that not all mushrooms are edible.26 Only those museums estab- lished upon a new pattern, upon the paradigm that shifts its focus from the collection and the curator to the communication of the overall identity of a community, answer the needs of the contemporary society. In this sense new museums as museums of identity would tend towards interdiscipli- narity, relying on collective memory and heritage. Future centers for heritage and local development (already partially recognized through the concept of eco-muse- ums) should be, as heritagefocused actions with the goal to acknowledge, preserve and integrally interpret the identity of a territory or community, the most similar to the concept of museums that answers the needs and desires of a society and which at the same time confirms Williamss theory of culture as the study of relationships be - tween elements in a whole way of life, or a unified system of civilizational, cultural, natural, social, economic and geographic values (2006: 39). In this manner the nine- teenth-century concept of identity manipulation with the purpose of positioning cul- ture would be replaced by a strategy of identity management. In the end we have to ask ourselves: do we need museums as (heritage) institutions? In his analysis of culture Williams thinks that the tendency of many academic insti- tutions towards self-perpetuation and their insensitiveness to change is often a great obstacle on the path of societal development. Change is necessary, as is the establish- ment of new institutions, but only if we understand the process of selective tradition correctly. The role of museums in the community is multiple: social and cultural ben- efits (cultural centers, development of identity in the area they exist in, educational function), economic benefits (tourism), political benefits (developing a sense of belong- ing). Museums are places for appreciating change but also an instrument of develop- ment. They are necessary for the survival of identity, the preservation of collective memory and the development of the community they serve. Concerning the concep- tual crisis and great changes in heritage institutions, as well as the fact that museums are too important to be relevant only to science (ola, 2003: 20), cultural studies, as a multidisciplinary area that shifts boundaries and tries to understand how culture works in contemporary society, with the special interest in the significance of identi- ty and the multiple ways it is transferred and experienced, could be of great help on the museums way towards redefining thei r role and mission.

5. What is Raymond William's contribution to the beginning of Cultural Studies at Birmingham? 2O

In a well-known essay, Stuart Hall, director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) from 1969 to 1979, declares, there is something at stake in cultural studies, in a way that I think, and hope, is not exactly true of many other important intellectual and critical practices. Here one registers the tension between a refusal to close the field, to police it and, at the same time, a determination to stake out some positions within it and argue for them. That is the tension. 1 What does Hall mean by this highly cryptic and loaded statement? Will discovering what Hall means aid our understanding of British cultural studies as an intellectual discourse? In order to answer these questions we first need to address the most pertinent and demanding question of all: what is cultural studies? Certainly, thinkers such as Hall had cause to ask and answer this question many times and in many different ways from a theoretical standpoint, in an effort to define the field of discourse in which they worked. However, it is only recently, with sufficient hindsight, that we find ourselves in the position to begin to ask and answer this question from a historical point of view.

Contemporary British cultural studies has its origins with the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in 1964 as a postgraduate research institute. In fact the intellectual genealogy of British cultural studies is concomitant with the intellectual history of the CCCS. The Centre is acknowledged for producing what are generally regarded as thefoundational texts of modern British cultural studies. Its approach was interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, literary criticism, and history. The Centres approach and methodology drew upon a long history of British cultural thinkers and later mined the intellectual wealth of contemporary European theoretical thought. These multiple approaches and multiple voices in turn impelled new questions and a subsequent rethinking of what culture means. The Birmingham group re-conceptualized popular culture as the location or site of resistance and negotiation by marginalized and disempowered groups in modern society and thus granted popular culture an entirely new order of importance. They perhaps most importantly reinterpreted culture in relation to dominant political structures and social hierarchies. The intention of this project, both implicitly and explicitly, was to give a voice to the marginalized. Initially, this project was propelled in terms of class but later, as we shall see, also in terms of gender and race. While scholars have done work in chronicling the intellectual history of British cultural studies, 2 none have analyzed in detail, the importance of the intervention of gender and race in the cultural discourse at the Centre. Of particular interest to me are the discursive effects that the inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives had on the Centre and thereby on British cultural studies in general. In other words I am interested in the extent to which the central voice of the Birmingham school was ruptured by the breaking in of other previously marginalized and often discordant voices. My ultimate objective however is to determine whether the arrival of these voices at the Centre was contestatory and defiant on the one hand or complementary and constructive on the

other. The first step in accomplishing this task is to trace the intellectual trajectory of British cultural studies as it happened at Birmingham. 3 Perhaps Mikhail Bakhtins notion of the dialogic (or polyphonic) is a useful intellectual framework in examining how voices at the Centre were at once conflicting and complementary to the overall discourse (in the most literal sense of the word) of British cultural studies as it emerged from the CCCS. In his book Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics (1929), Bakhtin observes that the characters in Fyodor Dostoevskys novels are liberated to speak a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices which are not contained by the authoritative control of the author. 4 In other words, the dialogic form of the text allows the characters to speak in their own voices. This allows the creation of a textual space where several voices, each possessing their own palpable definitiveness, are heard, where they converse, and yet where no voice or perspective dominates the others.5 A dialogic approach is profitable to understanding the manner in which different voices within British cultural studies and at the CCCS interacted, conversed, answered one-another, argued and disagreed. In a dialogic setting no single voice would come to dominate the others yet ideas and perspectives are always fiercely debated. Bakhtin suggests that these different voices and the subsequent modes of discourse are not just a verbal or literary phenomenon, but a social one as well. These discordant voices (what he refers to as a polyphonic heterogeneity) disrupt the authority or centrality of a single voice. Yet in the case of the Centre we must recognize the tenuous and protean nature of this situation. The dialogic at the CCCS was something that was never certain or fixed but always struggled over. As an ideal it was sometimes achieved and sometimes not. The more conscious and palpable this goal became in the minds of those at the Centre the more authentic and purposeful the struggle to achieve it became. When I use the term British cultural studies, I am explicitly referring to a specific discursive field of academic inquiry centered on the CCCS. It is the history of this discursive field (in both its intellectual and political context) that I will now trace a history that includes the formation of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies but, more significantly, beyond this institution to a wh ole field of academic inquiry. Originally the Centre was founded as part of the school of English at the University of Birmingham. Its agenda from the beginning was to utilize the methods and techniques of literary criticism to analyze mass culture and develop a critical criterion for texts. However, the Centre was soon granted autonomy as an independent postgraduate research centre. Cultural studies at the Centre was initially conceived not as an independent field of study but as a supplementary adjunct to social-scientific analysis. Stuart Hall, a key figure during the Centres formative years, notes:
Cultural studies have multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and comments in the past. It included many different kinds of work. I want to insist on that! It always was a set of unstable formations. It was centered only in quotation marks, in a particular way. It had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different

methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention. Theoretical work in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was more appropriately called theoretical noise. It was accompanied by a great deal of bad feeling, argument, unstable anxieties, and angry silences. 6 Halls quote richly characterizes the spirit of the Centre its hybridity and its dialogic atmosphere. His implication that the Centre had no fundamental intellectual Centre I believe succinctly articulates not necessarily the amorphous nature of the CCCS but rather its loose confederation of simultaneously complementary and conflicting voices. This dialogue, as characterized by Hall, with its multiplicity of voices and discourses never deteriorated into a discordant impasse or to the point of intellectual immobilization. Undeniably this dialogic was highly emotive, often hostile, and always volatile; nevertheless, it constantly seems to have fostered an environment of intellectual ferment and innovation in spite of this.

The genealogy of British cultural studies as a mode of scholarly inquiry can be traced to such early cultural writers and commentators such as Mathew Arnold, the Leavises and T.S. Eliot. This early manifestation of the discipline (unlike French and German cultural studies which had roots in sociology) has its roots in literary criticism but also operates from a perspective of cultural elitism. These cultural commentators narrowed their definition of culture to high culture the Great Tradition of English literature, which consisted of a limited literary canon (e.g. Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, etc.).7 However, even though these pioneers are credited with being the first to negotiate the terrain of culture from a British perspective, mass or popular culture was viewed by them as a subject to be derided and not worth serious study. British cultural studies, as it emerged from Birmingham, was built more or less directly on the intellectual and methodological foundation laid by two key figures: Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, both of whom drew extensively upon literary criticism a field in which they were trained.8 However, both attempted to engage culture not in the elite parochial sense of Arnold, Leavis or Elliot but in the sense of mass or working class culture that is culture tout ensemble. But leaving aside the intellectual lineage of cultural studies as it was manifested, fostered and given shape by the founding of the CCCS, let us turn briefly to the political and social milieu in which British cultural studies and the Centre was envisioned and mobilized. The project of cultural studies, as it took root and flourished at Birmingham, was shaped by a postwar British social and political movement known as the New Left. Dennis Dworkin asserts that the project of British cultural studies cannot be viewed in isolation; it must be seen in the context of the crisis of the British Left, a crisis virtually coterminous with the postwar era. 9 The character of the New Left movement was contingent and tumultuous; it lacked any form of permanent organization or centralized leadership. 10 Overall, the New Left movement was a tenuous heterogeneous conglomeration of ex-Communists, disaffected labour supporters, and socialist students hopeful of renewing socialist theory and practice.11 These individuals aggregated in reaction to resurgence of the British Tories in the 1950s. As Dennis Dworkin writes: leftist intellectual culture, dominant in the thirties and forties, was

displaced by a stifling conservatism founded on the revival of traditional values and a definition of Western culture defined as the best that has been thought and written. 12 The New Left was also mobilized in trenchant protest to specific political events, specifically the Suez and Hungary Crises in 1956, and in support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) during the late fifties and early sixties. It was also committed to breathing life into the social democratic politics that drew from a tradition of English popular radicalism but that skirted Leftist orthodoxy that was out of touch with the economic and social realities of postwar Britain. Hence, the New Left was also motivated by their disenchantment with the conventional or orthodox left. On the other hand, its emergence was also impelled by the disillusionment of many British Communists with Stalins Soviet Union. While the movement was impelled by these political commitments, it did possess a fundamental intellectual and theoretical component that was synonymous and inseparable from the political dimension. Dworkin notes: They never succeeded in creating a permanent organization, but they created a new political space on the Left, and their project was critical to the development of radical historiography and cultural studies in Britain. 13Consequently, in discussing the New Left as a postwar British political and intellectual project, it is also crucial to acknowledge that this project was firmly grounded in Marxist ideology. While the Centres Marxist roots are deep, these roots are not just intellectual but profoundly political. 14 The individuals at the Centre drew not only on the intellectual tradition of Marxism but on the Marxist-leftist legacy of political and social praxis as well. E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart, the three founding figures of the Centre, were also recognized influential members of the New Left. These three writers (Thompson, Williams, and Hoggart) working within the political milieu of the New Left, lay the foundation for the cultural theory of the Centre in terms of an analysis of working class culture and a critique of capitalism. Raymond Williams articulates this latter points relevance for the cultural studies project as a whole: Capitalisms version of society can only be the market, for its purpose is profit in particular activities rather than any conception of social use.15 Indeed the New Left is synonymous with a shift in Marxist thought and an emphasis on a cultural turn in Marxist thought. Marxisms cultural turn partly developed around a writing of history from below. New Left historians such as E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawn, Catherine Hall and Sheila Rowbotham and other members of the Communist Partys Historians Group were influential in voicing a concern with the social and cultural history of the British working class. The Group was founded in 1946, its core membership consisting of the radical student generation of the 1930s and early 1940s. Largely steeped in Marxist ideology, this cadre of intellectuals primarily saw themselves as a united front of progressive historians loudly countering what they saw as reactionary practices and attitudes present in British historiography at that time. Catherine Hall notes that the Communist Party Historians Group was a body which
had decided to challenge British historiography and construct a new body of Marxist history that would both connect with popular politics and engage with the academic establishment. [They]

called for a major reassessment of English cultural and political history and a communism which would combine elements of Marxism with popular radical English traditions.16 However the Group also provided, in a larger context, the fertile ground for the aforementioned cultural turn in Marxism to take root.17

British cultural Marxism thus grew out of an effort to create a socialist understanding of Britain, which took into consideration postwar transformations that seemed to undermine traditional Marxist assumptions about the working class and that questioned the traditional Lefts exclusive reliance on political and economic categories. Cultural Marxists were, above all, concerned with redefining the relationship between structure and agency, for it was the agency of traditional socialism (the industrial working class) that was being called into question. They attempted to identify the contours of the postwar terrain, to redefine social struggle, and to articulate new forms of resistance appropriate to a democratic and socialist politics in an advanced capitalist society. At the heart of this project was culture.18 This emphasis on the terrain of culture was in contrast to orthodox Marxism, which subordinated cultures importance to real social relations produced by the economic base. Marxism is firmly embedded in British cultural studies as Marxs discussion of class relations formed a compatible intellectual and theoretical framework on which to construct an examination of popular culture as a vessel for the working classs attempt at expression and agency.19 Cultural Marxism firstly allows a cultural text to be understood in terms of its socio-historical conditions of production and consumption.20 Moreover, culture and history are not reified insomuch as separate entities; they are rather inscribed on each other culture shapes and constructs history as much as history shapes and constructs culture.21 The two are inseparable components of the same process. Cultural Marxism asserts that culture is the site in which inequalities and stratification in modern capitalist societies are voiced and contested. Divisions in these societies occur along class, gender, ethnic, and generational lines and culture is seen as a terrain in which underclasses may exert a mode (no matter how tenuous) of resistance by challenging and traversing forms of cultural meaning proscribed by the dominant groups. These regnant cultural meanings reflect the vested interests of the hegemonic groups and thus are the targets of a struggle over re-defining them and wresting control and privilege over them away from those with power.22 Thus, Marxism highlights the ideological nature of culture a nexus in which contested meanings and symbols are struggled for over by subordinate and dominant groups.23 The highly ideological nature of culture was acknowledged by such founding figures of British cultural studies as Hoggart, Williams, and E. P. Thompson from the outset, whether they as individuals deployed an explicit Marxian framework or not. Yet the Centre would come to explicitly deploy Marxian analysis as a technology (to use an overtly Foucauldian term) of cultural investigation. The shift of Marxism itself towards culture involved extensive theoretical debate within the New Left. It was this debate that

helped elucidate British cultural studies. In other words, the emergence of cultural studies in Britain was fundamentally defined and voiced as an opposition to orthodox Marxism.24 While orthodox Marxists subordinated culture to real social relations produced by the economic base, the revisionists emphasized that culture mattered. Stuart Hall reflects:
There never was a prior moment when cultural studies and Marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit. From the beginning (to use this way of speaking for a moment) there was always already the question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding silences, the great evasions of Marxism the things that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand which were our privileged object of study: culture, ideology, language, the symbolic. That is to say, the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem not a theory, not even a problematic. It begins, and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and economism, which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relationships between society, economy and culture. It was located and sited in a necessary, prolonged, and as yet unending contestation with the question of false consciousness.25 Halls words reveal a point of rupture in the theoretical framework of British cultural studies wherein the Centre broke through the structural Marxism which had served as a theoretical framework and language of articulation but had also constrained interpretation and understanding within the discipline (in Foucaults double sense of the word).26 Hall herein expresses the intellectual lysis of a structural Marxism and the yoking of a Post-Structuralist technique best exemplified by Jacques Derridas deconstructionist approach. Such a strategy, pioneered by the French deconstructionists, calls for a dismantling and examination of rhetoric, assumptions and absences within texts. Indeed, according to Saussurian linguistics, language itself is not a rigid, autonomous structure, unchanging in time, but instead continually shifting through signifying practices, or rather the interplay of signifiers with each other.27 But let us now turn back to our discussion of Marxism.

Marxisms class analysis was from the outset compatible with the Centres emphasis on popular culture as a reflection of the working classs implicit struggle for self expression.28 British cultural studies nevertheless broke through the boundaries of traditional Marxism, which denigrated the importance of culture, claiming that it was merely a product of the economic base. Many historians within the Communist Party Historians Group had already criticized Marxs model as too simplistic to account for the functioning of history E. P. Thompson being the most prominent historian in this group to push beyond traditional Marxisms perimeters. In the mid-1960s the infusion of European theorists such as Lukcs, Benjamin, Goldman and Sartre began to complicate traditional British conceptions of Marxism.29 This re-conceptualizing of Marxism benefited cultural thinkers at the Centre greatly as this rethinking of the function and location of culture within Marxism allowed them to reapply it as an analytical language a language intrinsically steeped in issues of power and resistance.

From the outset, the Centres mandate was conceptualized as interdisciplinary in nature.30 There were three foundational disciplines on which cultural studies would rest when it arrived at the Centre: English literary criticism, history and sociology. Richard Hoggart, the first director of the Centre, envisioned the project of cultural studies as consisting of this triad of disciplines. Hoggart writes, The field f or possible work in Contemporary Cultural Studies can be divided into three parts: one is roughly historical and philosophical; another is, again roughly, sociological; the third which will be most important is the literary critical.31 Cultural studies would look to these disciplines not only for methodology but also for objects of criticism and analysis in and of themselves.32 Both Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams approached cultural studies from the practice of literary criticism and their contribution to the heritage of British cultural studies cannot be overstated. Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams had much in common. Both came from working class backgrounds and both were involved in adult education, both were literary critics and both were interested with the subject of culture in the class-stratified society of Britain. While the environment of Postwar Britain promoted an extension of educational opportunities (specifically adult education), as part of an effort at renewal and reconstruction, class politics were still very much prevalent in the midst of cultural changes and the raising of public consciousness. Britain was also coming under the influence of American popular cultural ideals. In this light, intellectuals such as Hoggart and Williams came to view mass culture as a subject worth of study in contrast to the elite or high culture traditionally viewed as the only culture worth studying.33 William and Hoggart boisterously valorize popular culture as the genuine expression of the working class. Unlike Mathew Arnold, T.S. Eliot and the Leavises they certainly do not view mass or popular culture as base and unworthy of serious study and analysis. Nor do they interpret popular culture as a banal and intellectually empty commodity manufactured by a culture industry. And unlike such cultural thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Hoggart, Williams and others who coalesced around the CCCS are concerned less with how people conform passively to an inherited culture than they are interested in how people receive and interact with the cultural commodities that they are faced with from day-to-day. They are interested in how popular culture is created but also how it is received and contested by different groups how it acts as a site for a struggle for cultural hegemony.34 Hoggart based much of his own work on the Leavises methodology of applying literary criticism to culture in general. This approach asserts that by analyzing culture and art, one can gain insight into the true complexity of a society into what Hoggart refers to as the felt quality of life. But perhaps further explanation of Hoggarts interpretation of culture is required. According to Hoggart, the elite within society attempt to legitimate their power and privilege by projecting their fields of value their mindsets, customs and values to become, in effect, the dominant culture. Yet there is resistance by the lower classes, and a struggle over cultural legitimacy and cultural dominance thus ensues. Hoggart sees popular culture, or the authentic working class culture of pre -war Britain, as an instrument of class struggle a means by which the working class can express their own values and mentality vis--vis the culture of the elite. He interprets working class or

popular culture as an interconnected entity or a gestalt of a specific working class family structure, its recreational patterns, language and communication, combined with an organic sense of community. This incredibly rich and meaningful working class culture is directly reflective or expressive of the working class lived experience. An authentic working class culture, Hoggart asserts, is in direct contrast to a commodified culture largely imported from the United States (consisting of popular music, television programs, pulp novels, and Hollywood movies). This latter commodified culture produced for mass consumption is, according to Hoggart, banal and empty. He claims that in post-war Britain mass culture is in a process of displacing traditional popular culture (which, as we have seen, is viewed as organic and experientially produced by the lived lives of the working class). Hoggart writes:
My argument is not that there was, in England one generation ago, an urban culture still very much of the people and that now there is only a mass urban culture. It is rather that the appeals made by the mass publicists are for a great number of reasons made more insistently, effectively and in a more comprehensive and centralised form today than they were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture; that the remnants of what was at least in parts an urban culture of the people are being destroyed; and that the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing.35 For Hoggart then, cultural studies is also a means to analyze how imported American mass culture subverts or colonizes traditional working class culture and, thereby, the British working class itself.

Raymond Williams takes a similar approach to Hoggart in regards to privileging popular working class culture; however, he takes a more explicitly Marxist approach. Williams holds the distinction of being the most influential socialist thinkers in the postwar years in Britain. In Culture and Society (1958), Williams traces the concept of culture from its origins during the Industrial Revolution to the present. He sees culture as an expression of the coherence of organic communities and also as a terrain for resisting domination and determinism. This is very similar to Hoggarts definition of culture, however Williams couches his analysis in unambiguous Marxist terms and definitions. In Culture and Society, Williams also engages in an analysis of language the way in which it is used to give expression and meaning to lived experience. Williams notes that there are keywords that map the shape of cultural meaning and understanding throughout history. He writes:
Five words are the key points from which this map can be drawn. They are industry, democracy, class, art and culture. The importance of these words, in our modern structure of meanings, is obvious. The changes in their use, at this critical period, bear witness to a general change in our characteristic way of thinking about our common life: about our social, political and economic institutions; about the purposes which these institutions are designed to embody; and about the relations to these institutions and purposes of our activities in learning, education and the arts.36

In The Long Revolution (1961) Williams outlines the practice of seeing culture as at once a creative activity and as a whole way of life.37 His project herein is to again follow the evolution of culture through its various historical manifestations towards its present condition. He characterizes this evolution as a process of continuous revolution. He states: It seems to me that we are living through a long revolution, which our best descriptions only in part interpret. It is genuine revolution, transforming men [sic] and institutions; continually expanded and deepened by the actions of millions, continually and variously opposed by explicit reaction and by the pressure of habitual forms and ideas. Yet it is a difficult revolution to define, and its uneven action is taking place over so long a period that it is almost impossible not to get lost in its exceptionally complicated process.38 By exploring these revolutionary changes in ideas and ways of understanding, Williams intention is to promote reflection and further social change. It is his hope that an examination of societys cultural heritage will encourage ongoing conscious progressive dialogue and change.39

Williams resists any notion of determinism yet acknowledges that specific societies are shaped by spatially and temporally contingent forces in other words by their local and temporary circumstances throughout history. Hence, to him, the category the masses is a misnomer the masses are not a fixed structure that can be isolated and examined out of their specific social and historical context. As Williams writes, There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.40 Subsequently he recognizes that there is good and bad mass culture but what is important is how we non-arbitrarily decide these categories of good and bad. It is the actual practice of assigning value to things (i.e. what is inherently good and what is inherently bad) that is the most important concern to Williams since this practice is never a neutral, objective or apolitical exercise. It is this formula that Williams sees as bolstering existing ideological structures and power relationships which serve to obstruct the common voices and efforts of ordinary individuals. Williams highlights the necessity for critically examining how and why cultural symbols and meanings are manufactured, and how and why they are accepted and maintained in society writ large (we can clearly see a strong parallel with Barthes here). In this, he seems to set the ground work for the invitation of Antonio Gramscis theory of hegemony into the discourse of cultural studies, as we shall see shortly. More relevant to our discussion here is that Williams sets the tone for the writing of history from below. As I have already mentioned, history is one of the founding disciplines of cultural studies as it began to speak from the CCCS after 1964. Through his seminal work The Making of the English Working Class (1963) E. P. Thompson changed how British history was thought about and written. Thompson, through a practice of history from below, intends to reveal the agency and historical experience of the working class, who had been ignored in the practice of traditional history. He does this by documenting the emergence of the English working class during a specific historic period through a narrative that focuses on the working class as its central historical agents. Thompson argues in this book that class cannot be conceived of as a rigid or fixed structure, but

rather as something that happens though time it is a historical process or phenomenon that cannot be frozen in one instance and analyzed. Thompson claims that class must be understood or approached as a social and cultural formation that only manifests itself (or becomes apparent) over a given historical period.41 In other words, Thompson proposes that class is not a thing it is something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. 42 Class is a historical event that cannot be understood as a static structure or category. In order to comprehend class, Thompson argues that it is necessary to see class as an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events both in the raw material of experience and consciousness. 43 Thompsons redefinition of class as a fluid historical event-construct thus paradoxically both facilitates and contemplates the notion of culture. Indeed he writes that class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.44 The working class exists in the very act of defining of themselves through their life experiences which is necessarily reflected in a working class culture: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms.45 Thompson further emphasizes that in looking at culture, the historical voices of both the winners and losers must be considered. It would be ahistorical or Whiggish, he believes, to make judgements where only the successful are remembered and the blind alleys, the lost causes and the losers themselves are forgotten. 46 The significance of the contribution of victims or the oppressed to the formation of culture is as apparent as that of the winners throughout history. Hence Thompson emphasizes that the lived experience, and therefore the very meaning of culture, are as significant among the casualties and the vanquished of history as among the winners. In fact, he sees the historical voices of those that have fought and lost as having important lessons to impart to those seeking social progress in the present. He states, In some of the lost causes of the people of the Industrial Revolution [e.g. the Luddites and the Chartists] we may discover insights into social evils which we have yet to cure. 47 Indeed Thompson notes that it is a historical imperative that [the] only criterion of jud gment should not be whether or not a mans [sic] actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves. 48 Thompson, in his warning against presupposed notions of historical progress or regress actually lays the intellectual groundwork for womens historians and non -western historians who take up this caveat not just from a class perspective but also from that of gender and race. Indeed, despite his trenchant engagements with those intellectuals taking other issues besides class into consideration, Thompson, through his focus on the experience and agency of the historical subject(s), arguably puts forward a prescription for a plurality of historical voices. This apparent openness to other possibilities and other historical voices, especially in a non-western context, is suggested when he writes: Moreover, the greater part of the world today [1963] is still undergoing problems of industrialization, and of the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolution. Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.49

Thompson further places the development of British popular culture within a historical context by revealing that it has a history. Thompson asserts that popular culture is not produced or manufactured by a culture industry ready-made for mass-consumption. On the contrary, it has a history that makes clear its organic connection to the lived experience of the working class. Thompson thus reveals a culture that is produced by the working class in contrast to a culture produced for a working class. In this Thompson establishes the cultural agency and voice of the working class a vital expression or reflection of working class historical experience, and a working class weltanschauung. Overall, The Making of the English Working Class contributed greatly to the conceptualization of cultural studies as it examines the struggle of the working class in terms of a working class culture. E. P. Thompson thus represents an intellectual bridge between the tradition of Communist historiography of the Historians Group a nd the burgeoning of cultural studies. Nevertheless, Thompson is very critical of the theoretical turn cultural Marxism in Britain undertook with its absorption of certain key aspects of structuralism as personified by the thought of Louis Althusser. Tho mpson, in fact, launches a loud acerbic attack against what he perceived to be a highly counterproductive intellectual trend. His viewpoints are published in the essay The Poverty of Theory, which was expanded into a book in 1978. 50In this work Thompson observers:
Althusser and his acolytes challenge, centrally, historical materialism itself. They do not offer to modify it but to displace it. In exchange they offer an a-historical theoreticism which, at the first examination, discloses itself as idealism. How then is it possible for these two to co-exist within one single tradition? Either, a very extraordinary mutation has been taking place, in the last few years, in the Marxist tradition: or that tradition is now breaking apart into two or several parts. What is being threatened what is now being rejected is the entire tradition of substantive Marxist historical and political analysis, and its accumulating (if provisional) knowledge.51 Thompsons rather hostile and vociferous reaction to these synchronic theoretical trends in British cultural studies somewhat alienated him from the intellectuals in that field thus Thompson is often seen as an ambiguous or even problematic figure in the canon of cultural studies.52 A discussion of the structuralism that Thompson so objected to will perhaps facilitate a further understanding of this issue.

British cultural studies was profoundly influenced in a theoretical context by the French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser in the 1970s. Althusser views society as a structural whole which consists of substructures (legal, political, cultural, etc.) whose effectivity or manifestation is only determined in the last instance by the economic base.53 The differences and relationships between these substructures are more important than the way in which each reflects the nature of the whole. In other words, from a structuralist perspective, an understanding of differential relations is crucial to an analysis of society and culture. Nevertheless structure is recognized not as existing prior to differential relations but simultaneously with them. For Althusser the

mode of production, as it changes through history, is permanently embedded in the separate levels of the whole superstructure. This perspective thus disallows human agency through the conscious deliberate actions of the individual in the formation of societal relationships. Each person is merely an element or cog in the whole structure and denied an existence external to the societal conditions of the system.54 Althusser uses the term overdetermined to describe the way in which the mode of production is not necessarily grounded or rooted in ideology or class consciousness but exists in a displaced form dispersed throughout the entire structure of society it is the milieu or episteme in which society is nested. These overdetermined factors (economic, cultural, and political) complete and contest each other thereby, in effect, weaving the very fabric of society and culture.55 The main ideological substructures of society religion, education, family, government, the law are as significant as the economic means of production. To Althusser, culture is not solely reliant or determined by the economic mode. Yet neither is it completely autonomous from economic conditions and relationships. This interpretation sees ideology as a false consciousness, as Marxism traditionally believed, but ideology also serves as the conceptual means by which members of a society understand (though that may be falsely) their lived lives and their material conditions. Hence ideology has a profound effect on the production of culture and how members of a society perceive themselves and the society around them. Although Althusserian analysis and terminology is evident in the writing that was produced at Birmingham its use was always consciously problematic (E. P. Thompson most notably denounced the anti-humanism of Althusserism). While Althusserian structuralism provided those at Birmingham with useful intellectual language in approaching culture, Althussers more problematic aspects (such as his denial of human agency) prompted those at the Centre to search for more appealing theoretical tools. Antonio Gramscis thought provided a subsequent compelling framework for analyzing society and culture.56 Gramscis theory of hegemony postulated an understanding of how a society is bound together without direct authoritative control. Hegemony is the method understood by Gramsci to be the means of exercising power without the use of overt force. The dominant group or ruling class faction (which Gramsci describes as a historical bloc) exercises their control and authority over the subordinate classes. They do this not simply through their access to the means of physical coercion or domination but more sign ificantly through their ability to create consent through an intellectual and moral leadership. 57 This consent is obtained and maintained by the dominant group through a negotiation of cultural meanings, ideas, and values. Rather than being imposed from above or developed in a free or incidental manner, cultural artifacts are negotiated contingently on the basis of encounters and conflicts between the opposing classes. The process in which this representation and authoritative set of representations and practices operates takes place on a number of fronts.58 Significantly culture is the location in which this struggle for hegemony occurs. It is especially on the field of popular culture that the issues of power and control come to conflict and eventually reach closure in the form of a consensual compromise between the competing classes. Thus the notion of hegemony

provides a flexible and compatible framework for those at the CCCS. As we shall now see, the Gramscian turn at the Centre was in fact largely facilitated by the work being done by Stuart Hall. Stuart Hall, a key intellectual of the New Left who drew upon the cultural approaches of Hoggart and William, became the director of the Centre in 1969 following Hoggarts departure. Halls writing is often thought of as the most influential or significant body of work in the canon of British cultural studies. He was a cutely aware of a need for cultural discourse to ask theoretical and political questions, and so consciously involved himself in both activism and academic work. Hall emphasized that the intellectual must always position her or himself on the cutting edge of knowledge and theory, and cannot absolve himself or herself from the responsibility of transmitting those ideas, that knowledge, through the intellectual function, to those who do not belong, professionally, in the intellectual class.59 From the outset, intellectuals involved with the New Left and with the Centre both implicitly and explicitly saw themselves as having a deliberate political role to play beyond the confines of the academy. Thus there was a conscious effort by all (and, dare I say, a consensus) at the Centre to embrace an ideal that can best be described by Antonio Gramscis concept of the organic intellectual. This concept refers to those individuals who were overtly identified with an underclass and purposefully voice its interests and political objectives. However, cultural studies appropriated and expanded Gramscis notion of the intellectual (as it did with his concept of hegemony) beyond the scope of class to include the power relations of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, age, consumerism, meaning and pleasure.60 Halls life and work are a conscious and deliberate attempt to recognize this belief an d bear it out in practice. Indeed Hall believes the intellectual must come to terms with conflicting forces, contest them, even use them for creative and political ends. It is this belief or spirit that consequently permeates the entire discourse of cultural studies at Birmingham, especially under Halls leadership from 1969 to 1979. Organic intellectualism allowed the very intellectual space at the Centre to be used as an open dialogue for contesting all knowledge and conventions, even those held by the leading members of the Centre themselves. It was this dialogic spirit a spirit that tried to acknowledge those outside of a core of intellectual lites that would position cultural studies as a location for the voices of feminism and race to be heard, as we shall see. But it was ironically a location that also harbored trenchant resistance to ideas which were perceived to be trying to overturn or subvert the class analysis bias long established at the Centre. Indeed these contestatory projects at the Centre (most notably feminism) revealed that the intellectual concern of cultural studies at the Centre was not only a class-based inflexibility but also one which, moreover, focused on a profoundly male subject. This narrow perspective of the Centre was only expanded in the 1980s to give expression to issues of gender and race as the result of great internal political and intellectual struggle.

The political openness of cultural studies would seemingly allow for a more broad analysis of other marginalized or disadvantaged groups, most significantly women and minority groups nevertheless this did not occur all at once.61 Pioneering intellectual work would eventually be done which aimed at empowering and giving voice to these groups through an understanding of the relationship between culture and the workings of different forms of power, and thus making possible the formulation of political strategies for countering this power. Women at the Centre in the late 1970s noted that there was an obvious absence of female subjects within the work being done in cultural studies. There was precious little focus on womens cultural practices in the cutting edge research being done into subcultures and subcultural practices. Angela McRobbie was among the first researchers at the CCCS to draw attention to the unfortunate fact that women were a lacuna and that the subjects of this research had an unambiguously masculine prerogative.62 The production of male-centered studies and histories by members of the Centre thus unconsciously reproduce[d] their subcultures repressible [sic] attitude towards women.63 McRobbie further notes:
This is not to say that women are denied style, rather that the style of a subculture is primarily that of its men. Linked to this are the collective celebrations of itself through its rituals of stylish public self-display and of its (at least temporary) sexual self-sufficiency.64 A similar observation was published in Women Take Issue (1978) in which the male middle class bias of Centre was critiqued. The Editorial Group of this groundbreaking volume articulated the barriers they faced in doing this work and their motivations for pushing beyond these barriers: When we decided to do this book we thought we were deciding to produce the eleventh issue of Working Papers in Cultural Studies. Ten issues, with only four articles concerning women it seemed about time. Womens continuing invisibility in the journal, and in much of the intellectual work done within CCCS (although things are changing), is the result of a complex of factors, which although in their particular combination are specific to our own relatively privileged situation, are not unique to it. We want here to outline some of the problems the Womens Studies Group has faced, in a way which gives this book some sort of history, but also attempts to deals with more general problems of womens studies and trying to do feminist intellectual work.65 Women Take Issue was authored by Angela McRobbie, Charlotte Brundson, Dorothy Hobson, Janice Winship, Rachel Harrison and other writers at the Centre who came together under the collective name of the Womens Studies Group. The group was formed in 1974 with the mission to investigate and analyze women as cultural subjects. This represented an opening of ethnographic research into the largely overlooked, or silenced, cultural lives of women and the textual analysis of feminine cultural forms (such as teenage and womens magazines). The Womens Studies Groups critique of the patriarchal approach and assumptions of the previous work at the Centre reveals that the results of previous cultural analysis are heavily gender biased and contribute to the oppression of women by relegating them to relative obscurity.66 The result of this revelation was an opening up of the discourse at the Centre. It pushed the research at the Centre to be more inclusive to the voice of outsiders, but also in making the

research and language at the Centre less arcane and esoteric during a period when much of it tended towards theoreticism.67

This investigation further reveals the ways in which culture is a locus where the social categories and arrangements of gender can be contested. Ideology and cultural institutions reinforce the bifurcation of male and female subject headings, which is made evident in the placement of women in cultural production (as creators, and consumers of this culture). Moreover, this research dealt with the role of women in the different modes of cultural representation (popular culture, literature, and the visual arts) which act as the setting for the playing out of constructed notions of gender. The intervention of feminist theory into the work being done at the Centre allowed important new dialogues to be opened. It inspired further projects, extending the Centres understanding of race but also in the possible ways that race, gender and class were linked. A key work towards vocalizing this further understanding was contained within the collaborative work The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982).68 This book is a collection of essays written in the aftermath of Thatchers 1979 victory and the race riots of the early 1980s.70 Earlier, in Policing the Crisis (1978), Stuart Hall points out how the media constructed and built up the crime of mugging and the social type of the mugger, and conflated these notions with racial minorities and broader social problems. The racially circumscribed mugger provided a convenient scapegoat (i.e. the young black male) or excuse for the dominant hegemony to reassert itself through a policy of cracking down on crime. Indeed, the work done in The Empire Strikes Back was built upon the groundwork laid by Hall in Policing the Crisis. Both works emphasize the need to reexamine racism in reference to its specific historical and social context instead of viewing it as a universal constant across the range of human experience. This work on racism and sexism was in concordance with Williams and Hoggarts early attempts to use personal experiential accounts as ingress to the investigation of more extensive cultural phenomenon.71 In this way, the Centres investigation into racism and sexism was a further exploration in the ways in which the personal was the political. Work along these lines vastly contributed to the understanding of race, identity and difference at the Centre (and thus in British cultural studies in general). This investigation helped lead to the recognition of race as a socially and historically constructed concept. The meaning of race is shown to have changed over history; however there is no prior universal or essentialized categorization of race. Race cannot be reduced to clear-cut, biologically or genetically valid differentiations. Like gender, it is a socially and historically contingent construct. Race came to be seen in relation to the specific forms of struggle by black people in their efforts to resist the oppression of both the British State and British society. In this context, race relations have become the central aspect of the attempts to orchestrate politically and therefore to manage the effects of the organic crisis. We must locate the pertinence of 'race' within this hegemonic struggle and assess its articulation by and with the processes which secure economic, ideological and political power and domination. 71 Further work would be done elaborating greatly on these new meanings and understandings of race. This work would also further the cause of making the discourse of cultural studies more inclusive

of the marginalized Other. One of the most noteworthy intellectuals to push the disciplinary boundaries in this direction was the sociologist Paul Gilroy. In There Aint No Black in the Union Jack (1987), Paul Gilroy engages in a discussion of the relationship between the black diaspora in Britain, on the one hand, and the construction (or reconstruction) of the British national cultural identity, on the other.72 Gilroy voices a unique or groundbreaking examination of race in Britain during the 1980s. Gilroy sees an intrinsic linkage between race, class, and gender in this complex relationship. He offers the idea that race does not correspond to any biological or epistemological absolutes,73 rather he (similarly to Hall) sees it as an open political category referring to the power that collective identities acquire by means of their roots in tradition.74Gilroy asserts that race is an unfixed, mutable category that is at once historically and culturally contingent. In his analysis Gilroy notes that this is counterproductive to those studying race to subsume a specifically racial problematic and assume that race can be analyzed within the confines of traditional Marxian analysis.75 In fact in the outset of the book Gilroy emphasizes that race must not be perceived solely in terms of class issues and class analysis. He refuses the notion of class as a unifying category of analysis or even praxis. In fact, Gilroy rethinks the notions of class and surplus values that can be deployed as tools in the analysis of race and national identity. Gilroy points to the unfortunate fact that nationally rooted racist attitudes transcend not only the political divide between left and right but also class barriers. This is especially valid since Gilroy is writing at a time when a revitalized Right is exacting draconian punitive measures against organized labour while a demoralized Left is in disarray. It is this political, social and cultural environment that Gilroy sees as being the locus for the breaking down of traditional perceived alliances between the Left and issues defined by race. He sees the New Left as an heir equal to the Right to an aesthetic and cultural tradition embracing and compounding a sense of nationalism, and therefore a sense of racism, by denying cultural referents external to those of traditional (white) British identity. It is an odd convergence of Left and Right wing voices in regards to the politics of nationality and the politics of race that Gilroy seeks to interrogate and historize. Exploring this seemingly paradoxical Left-Right convergence over the politics of race and national identity, Gilroy points to it having emerged in the postcolonial politics of Britain after World War Two.76 But it is the prevalent bipartisan nature of Thatcherite era racism that Gilroy sees as anchored in the anxieties of national decline rather than imperialist expansion abroad. This recent articulation of racism does not necessarily proceed through traditional notions of racial superiority and inferiority. The nature of racial power relations has become more subtle and evasive, and Gilroy asserts that this is fundamentally the basis for the convergence of Leftist and Rightist rhetoric in the politics of race.77 He notes that [t]his coming together is a characteristic feature of contemporary 'race' politics in Britain.78 Gilroy observes that political strategy on the part of the Left has involved the attempt to counter the Rights monopoly on British nationalism and patriotism by constructing an alternative nationalism and patriotism around the English working-man. British

historians, most notably E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, have attempted to locate this idealized referent at the Centre of a true British cultural identity. Gilroy draws attention to the Lefts rhetorical attempt to re-appropriate nationalistic and patriotic fervor during the Falklands War as a clear manifestation of this trend.79However this pernicious attempt on the part of the Left to redefine the semiotics of British identity only betrays the ethnocentric nature of the entire nationalist project. In fact, the very presence of a black (or Asian) diaspora that overtly refuses to conform to this ideal national dialogue represents a threat that must either be ignored or silenced outright as non-British in this new paradigm. Yet while Gilroy offers useful critiques of Marxist approaches, he does not see a need to completely dismiss a Marxian analysis altogether. Indeed Gilroys critiques are very instructive as he calls for more totalizing Marxian approach to race and class (as well as the gender, sexuality, and generation). Gilroy acknowledges the valuable insights that the Marxist approach has to offer in articulating a materialist theory of culture vis--vis capital. Yet he sees cultural studies (viz. cultural Marxisms) prior attempts to sidestep (or ignore outright) the voice of race as pernicious at best. The invisibility or silencing of race in the discipline reveals that in spite of itself, [cultural studies] tends towards a morbid celebration of England and Englishness from which blacks are systematically excluded.80 In retrospect, work done at the Centre on racism and sexism contributed to an understanding that such inequities were implicit to capitalism. However, an answer to the overall question of how to resolve the importance of the voices of gender and race within the class bias of Marxist criticism remains elusive. On the other hand, the intervention of gender and race has served to complicate the reductionist perspective of Marxism in a very positive way. Paul Gilroy argues that this complication of Marxism has led to a view of class formation as an effect of heterogeneous struggles perhaps promised in different communities linguistic, sexual, regional, ecological and racial.81 The debate continues as to how the different, yet not mutually exclusive, axes of class, gender, and race (there are of course more areas of analysis than this) are to be reconciled with each other within British cultural studies. What weight or priority is to be granted to each of them in matters in which they conflict? There is no consensus at the present time not even between white feminists and women of colour who are inclined to disagree about how race and gender intersects in forms of oppression. 82 Yet it is my assertion that the intellectual space provided by British cultural studies at Birmingham has allowed this debate to play out in an immensely productive, on-going dialogue. It is here that Bakhtins concept of the dialogic is efficacious to understanding the dynamics in place at the Centre. To Bakhtin, literature or the text is the site for the dialogic interaction of multiple voices. However he also suggests that these different voices and the subsequent modes of discourse in a text are not just a verbal or literary phenomenon, but a social one as well. These discordant voices (what he refers to as a polyphonic heterogeneity) in a text may be seen to disrupt the authority or centrality of a single voice namely the author.83

British cultural studies as it emerged from Birmingham also fits into a larger Bakhtinian practice or methodology. Bakhtin begins his analytical method by continually instituting a dialogue between previous studies and his own commentaries an approach which sees itself as always occurring within the context of a larger historical and critical movement. This is relevant to an analysis of the Centre as the scholarship that was practiced within its walls was/is always acutely aware of its own position towards the scholarship that came before it and an awareness of a need to push beyond it. Dialogic criticism, or the dialogical approach, proposes that a narrative work, and even culture as well, is constituted by a plurality of absolute contending and mutually qualifying social voices, with no possibility of a decisive resolution in the form of a monologic truth or single authoritative consensus. There is simply one voice among many in the contention of theories and practices, which coexist in a sustained tension of opposition and mutual definition. Hence it is my assertion that the differing opinions, perspectives, or voices at the Centre (most notably with the arrival of gender and race) confo rm to a dialogic interpretation. In this way the differing perspectives throughout the history of the CCCS never conflict to the point of theoretical or political paresis. Rather they are always engaged in a vigorous dialogue of separate and valid voices a t tension as Hall would say within an overarching discursive framework that is also inclusive of new voices from without.
2. On what account does Coleridge attack Wordsworth's views on poetic diction? 20

The story of Biographia Literaria begins many years before the book was published in 1817. Its origins, indeed, may be traced back nearly two decades to Coleridge's German tour of 1798-9 and a projected biography of the dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The first we hear of the Lessing project is in a letter to Poole of January 1799, where the work is described as "a Life of Lessing -- & interweaved with it a true state of German Literature, in its rise & present state" (CL, i 455). Coleridge had chosen the "Life of Lessing", he told Josiah Wedgwood in May 1799, because "it would give me an opportunity of conveying under a better name, than my own ever will be, opinions, which I deem of the highest importance" ( CL, i 519). The Lessing project had as its object, not biography per se, but the explication and dissemination of general truths which Lessing had articulated in a manner and with an authority that Coleridge considered beyond his own capacity. The relevance of the Lessing scheme to Biographia Literaria will become apparent if we pursue the evidence a little further. Coleridge left Germany, the biography unwritten, in July 1799. Toward the end of July 1800 he settled finally, after a year of wandering, at Greta Hall, Keswick, twelve miles from the Wordsworths' cottage at Grasmere. Lessing, however, was not forgotten during this period. In January 1800, busy with political articles for the Morning Post, Coleridge was nevertheless expecting "in April" [207] to return to "my greater work -- the Life of Lessing" (CL, i 559); in July, indeed on the very day on which he moved into Greta Hall, he told Josiah Wedgwood that "I am now working at my introduction to the life of Lessing which I trust will be in the press before Christmas -- that is, the Introduction which will be published first I believe" (CL, i 610-11); and finally, on 9 October, in an important letter to Humphry Davy, he declared that

The works which I gird myself up to attack as soon as money-concerns will permit me, are the Life of Lessing -- & the Essay on Poetry. The latter is still more at my heart than the former -it's Title would be an Essay on the Elements of Poetry / it would in reality be a disguised System of Morals & Politics . . . . (CL, i 632) The most noticeable feature of these three statements is the shift in emphasis from the biography of Lessing to the prefatory essay designed (originally) to introduce it. Between January and October 1800 Coleridge's interest and energies focused more and more on the introductory "Essay on Poetry", which he came eventually to see as a volume in its own right. This shift in interest is not difficult to explain. Coleridge was outgrowing Lessing. As he meditated on the nature of poetry and the principles of poetic composition -- an investigation facilitated and furthered by his renewed association with Wordsworth in the summer of 1800 -Coleridge began seriously to develop his own ideas, to evolve his own theories. More and more he wished to state his views, not Lessing's; and, as a consequence, the introductory "Essay on Poetry" lay more at his heart than the proposed biography. After October 1800, indeed, we hear nothing more about a "Life of Lessing" at all. Why then did Coleridge not publish his "Essay on Poetry" in 1800? The simple answer is that the essay -- at least in its aesthetic aspect -- was eventually written, not by Coleridge, but by Wordsworth, who published it as the Preface to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads. We now know, from statements by both Coleridge and Wordsworth, that the idea of introducing the poems with an analytic preface was Coleridge's and that it was originally intended that the preface (replacing the short "Advertisement" of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads) should have been written by him. In a [208] marginal comment of 1839 in Barron Field's Memoirs of Wordsworth, Wordsworth declared, In the foregoing there is frequent reference to what is called Mr W s theory, & his Preface. I will mention that I never cared a straw about the theory -- & the Preface was written at the request of Mr Coleridge out of sheer good nature. I recollect the very spot, a deserted Quarry in the Vale of Grasmere where he pressed the thing upon me, & but for that it would never have been thought of.1 (Wordsworth did, of course, care about the theory or he would not have defended it so lustily in subsequent additions to his 1800 Preface.) Coleridge, for his part, described his role in a letter of July 1802: "It is most certain, that that Preface arose from the heads of our mutual Conversations &c -- & the first passages were indeed partly taken from notes of mine/ for it was at first intended, that the Preface should be written by me" (CL, ii 811). The Coleridgean "notes" on which the first part of the Preface was based have, it seems, been lost -- unless, that is, a vestige of them survives in a faded, almost illegible Notebook entry of August or September 1800 containing the tantalising phrase "recalling of passion in tranquillity" (CN, i 787).2 In any case, what is clear from these statements is that Coleridge was the "only begetter" of the 1800 Preface, that (for reasons which remain obscure) it was eventually written by Wordsworth, who used some of Coleridge's notes at least in the initial sections, and that (as Coleridge later reported) "The Preface contains our joint opinions on Poetry" (CL, i 627). Whenever Wordsworth took over the writing of the Preface, it was finished by the end of September, when Dorothy copied out "the last sheet" of it for the printer's copy

(JDW, p. 41). Once the Preface had been written, once their "joint opinions on Poetry" had been set down by Wordsworth, Coleridge's motivation to articulate his own position became less pressing -- but it did not entirely disappear. In September-October 1800 Coleridge was still planning, even after Wordsworth had finished the Preface, to press on with the Lessing project and his "Essay on the Elements of Poetry" (see CL, i 623, 632). Why were these projects, especially the latter, never brought to fruition? Indolence, no doubt, was partly to blame; so, too, was illness and Coleridge's immersion in [209] "abstruse researches". And there was also, I suspect, another reason: Coleridge had not yet worked out to his own satisfaction the underlying "principles" or "elements" of poetry; he needed more time to think and study, more time to mature and explore the hints and half-revealed theories on which he was meditating. All that could be said in 1800 had been said by Wordsworth in the Preface. For the moment, Coleridge could go no further. In January 1801 Coleridge spoke warmly of Wordsworth's "valuable Preface" (CL, ii 665), but then we hear no more about the matter until July 1802. The intervening eighteen months, however, had seen a dramatic reversal in his views. On 13 July 1802 Coleridge wrote to William Sotheby expressing his doubts about Wordsworth's theories of poetic diction and metre : "Indeed, we have had lately some little controversy on this subject -- & we begin to suspect, that there is, somewhere or other, a radical Difference in our opinions" (CL, ii 812). It was, almost certainly, the publication of the third edition of Lyrical Ballads (1802) with its revised and expanded Preface and an Appendix on poetic diction that focused Coleridge's growing uneasiness about Wordsworth's theory and prompted in him a renewed interest, in JulySeptember 1802, in literary theory -- a renewal of interest which led to the revision of Dejection: An Ode and to the initial formulation of the fancy-imagination distinction. Coleridge received a copy of the new edition of Lyrical Ballads in late June or early July 1802. Within a fortnight he had written to Sotheby about "a radical Difference" between his own and Wordsworth's theories of poetry. At the end of the month, in a letter to Robert Southey (29 July), he was more explicit -- and he was planning, he said, to set down his own views in a series of critical essays on contemporary poets, including Wordsworth: The object is not to examine what is good in each writer, but what has ipso facto pleased, & to what faculties or passions or habits of the mind they may be supposed to have given pleasure / Of course, Darwin & Wordsworth having given each a defence of their mode of Poetry, & a disquisition on the nature & essence of Poetry in general, I shall necessarily be led rather deeper. (CL, ii 829-30) He went on to say that he had been "startled" in reading some of Wordsworth's recent poetry to discover "here & there a daring [210] Humbleness of Language & Versification, and a strict adherence to matter of fact, even to prolixity"; and, as for the poetic theory, he declared himself "far from going all lengths with Wordsworth". The Appendix in the new edition of Lyrical Ballads he thought "valuable", but parts of the revised Preface were "obscure beyond any necessity" ; and he was resolved "to go to the Bottom" of the differences between his own and Wordsworth's theoretical opinions on poetry and, by "acting the arbitrator between the old School & the New School . . . to lay down some plain, & perspicuous, tho' not superficial, Canons of Criticism respecting Poetry" (CL, ii 830). There are three things to notice in this statement to Southey. First, the major areas of

disagreement with Wordsworth centre on poetic diction and versification and on an even more fundamental difference (which he feels but does not yet understand) growing out of some underlying tension between Wordsworth's theory and his actual practice as a poet. The nature of this discrepancy, as Coleridge began to see in September, was that his friend's theory (based on Hartleian associationism) took account of the poetry of fancy but not of the poetry of imagination; and the best and most characteristic of Wordsworth's own poetry was imaginative, not fanciful (see above, pp. 179-81). All of these issues -- poetic diction, versification, fancyimagination -- are, of course, matters of central importance in the later Biographia Literaria. Second, it is apparent from his ruminations in the letter to Southey that Coleridge, immersed in abstruse philosophical and psychological researches that were leading him "rather deeper" into the nature and essence of poetic experience than Wordsworth found it necessary to go, was concerned with the general underlying principles of composition and poetic pleasure: "not to examine what is good in [an individual] writer, but what has ipso facto pleased". This, too, foreshadows the method of Biographia Literaria: it was Mr Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind ; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness. (ch. 4; BL, i 64) [211] Finally, in July 1802 Coleridge still expected to proceed biographically, not autobiographically. Although Lessing had yielded place to contemporary English poets (especially Wordsworth), Coleridge's plan was still to refract "opinions, which I deem of the highest importance", through the writings of other men. The title for the proposed work, he told Southey, was to be "Concerning Poetry, & the characteristic Merits of the Poets, our Contemporaries -- one Volume Essays, the second Selections" (CL, ii 829). The centrality of Wordsworth in the evolution and early planning of what was eventually to become the Biographia Literaria is something that must be insisted upon. We begin with Lessing but come quickly to Wordsworth; and, as George Whalley has said, "The various modifications of the Lessing scheme, the talks with Wordsworth that produced the 1800 Preface, and the attempts to resolve the 'radical difference' that he mentioned to Southey in July 1802, made the need for a personal statement imperative".3 In a letter to Thomas Wedgwood (20 Oct 1802) Coleridge was still wrestling with the problem of poetic diction, convinced that poetry required "a certain Aloofness from the language of real Life, which I think deadly to Poetry"; he was working, he told Wedgwood, on elaborating in full his opinions "on the subject of Style both in prose & verse", first, in an analysis of English prose from Bishop Hall to Dr Johnson, and then, this completed, "I shall . . . put together my memorandum Book on the subject of poetry" (CL, ii 877). Then in September or October 1803 the biographical thread that had begun with Lessing became an autobiographical one: "Seem to have made up my mind", Coleridge confided in his pocket-book, "to write my metaphysical works, as my Life, & in my Life -- intermixed with all the other events / or history of the mind & fortunes of S.T. Coleridge" ( CN, i 1515).4 How or why he came to this determination we shall probably never know. Nevertheless, what is important (as D.M. Fogel points out) is that by the end of 1803 "Coleridge

possessed the main elements of the Biographia, both in its intense concern with speculation arising from his experience of Wordsworth and in its autobiographical intention".5 For more than a decade, however, nothing happened. Between October 1803 and March 1815 the plan for a literary autobiography drops completely out of sight; it is not mentioned anywhere in Coleridge's letters or Notebooks or marginalia or published works. This does not mean, of course, that he ceased to speculate and to sharpen his views about the nature of poetry and poetic composition, about [212] Wordsworth as poet and critic, about the metaphysical and psychological foundations of aesthetic theory. Quite the reverse, indeed, is true. Coleridge's writings of this period are full of ideas (in various states of development) that turn up later in Biographia Literaria -- but the "idea" of Biographia Literaria itself is absent. In March 1815, in great financial distress, Coleridge asked some of his Bristol friends to advance him money in the form of a loan, using his manuscripts as security.6 His first approach, on 7 March, was to Joseph Cottle (CL, iv 546-7); but within three days, anticipating Cottle's refusal, he had applied to William Hood, another Bristol friend (CL, iv 551). The result was that Hood, after consulting John Gutch and a Mr Le Breton (both former schoolfellows of Coleridge), accepted the proposal and sent Coleridge a loan to cover his immediate debts. (Later in the year they paid his life-insurance premium, advanced him further money, and also arranged for the printing at Bristol of his poems and Biographia, on the understanding that the printing-expenses and Coleridge's personal debt would be recovered by the sale of these works to a London publisher.) By the end of March 1815, as we know from a letter to Lord Byron, Coleridge was planning a collective edition of his poems which was to include "all the poems composed by me from the year 1795 to the present Date, that are sanctioned by my maturer Judgement, all that I would consent to have called mine if it depended on my own will". This edition, he went on to say, would contain two prefaces: A general Preface will be pre-fixed, on the Principles of philosophic and genial criticism relatively to the Fine Arts in general; but especially to Poetry: and a particular Preface to the Ancient Mariner and the Ballads, on the employment of the Supernatural in Poetry, and the Laws which regulate it. (CL, vi 1033-5) He expected to have the work ready for the press by the first week of June. In the event, however, as we shall shortly see, the affair was to be both more complicated and more protracted than Coleridge originally expected. Eventually, the edition of his poems appeared as Sibylline Leaves, the "general Preface" became Biographia Literaria -- both finally published in 1817 -- and the proposed preface on "the Supernatural in Poetry" (while promised at the end of the first volume of Biographia Literaria -- BL, i 202) was never, in fact, written. [213] In April-May 1815 Coleridge was busy collecting and polishing poems for his new edition, and on 30 May he informed Wordsworth that he had "only to finish a Preface which I shall have done in two or at farthest three days" (CL, iv 567) in order to complete the work. Then, for two months, we hear nothing -- either because Coleridge wrote few letters (as is probable) or because they have not survived. But when the silence is broken, in a letter of 29 July to R.H. Brabant, the revelation is both surprising and dramatic: The necessity of extending, what I first intended as a preface,7 to an Autobiographia literaria, or Sketches of my literary Life & opinions, as far as Poetry and poetical Criticism is concerned, has

confined me to my Study from 11 to 4, and from 6 to 10, since I last left you . -- I have just finished it, having only the correction of the Mss. to go thro'. -- I have given a full account (raisonn) of the Controversy concerning Wordsworth's Poems & Theory, in which my name has been so constantly included -- I have no doubt, that Wordsworth will be displeased8 -- but I have done my Duty to myself and to the Public, in (as I believe) compleatly subverting the Theory & in proving that the Poet himself has never acted on it except in particular Stanzas which are the Blots of his Compositions. -- One long passage -- a disquisition on the powers of association, with the History of the Opinions on this subject from Aristotle to Hartley, and on the generic difference between the faculties of Fancy and Imagination -- I did not indeed altogether insert, but I certainly extended and elaborated, with a view to your perusal -- as laying the foundation Stones of the Constructive or Dynamic Philosophy in opposition to the merely mechanic--. (CL, iv 578-9) Between 30 May, when he wrote to Wordsworth, and this statement to Brabant at the end of July, Coleridge abandoned (or, rather, extended) his plan to write a "general Preface" for his collected poems and composed, instead, an "Autobiographia literaria". Now, if we accept (as we must, given the complete absence of documentary evidence) that we cannot know exactly when during these two months (June-July 1815) Coleridge changed his plans, we are left still with two important questions, both of which can be answered at least conditionally: first, what prompted him to [214] metamorphose his proposed preface into a literary autobiography?; and, second, how much (and which parts) of the Biographia Literaria had he in fact composed when he wrote to Brabant at the end of July 1815? While other factors are involved, a partial solution to the first question is provided by Coleridge himself: "in consequence of information received from various Quarters," he told Gutch in September 1815, I concluded, that a detailed publication of my opinions concerning Poetry & Poets, would excite more curiosity and a more immediate Interest than even my Poems. -- Therefore instead of Poems and a Preface I resolved to publish "Biographical Sketches of my LITERARY LIFE, Principles, and Opinions, chiefly on the Subjects of Poetry and Philosophy . . .". (CL, iv 584). Supposed commercial prospects, then, exercised a determining influence; but there were other factors too, the most important of which may be summarised in a single word -- Wordsworth. For well over a decade, as we have seen, the long-meditated project of setting down his critical opinions on poetry had been intimately connected with Wordsworth, and the early motivation for such a work had been provided by his conviction of a "radical Difference" between his views and those of his friend. In the spring of 1815 Coleridge was still concerned about Wordsworth's theory and its (often) deleterious effect on his poetry. In comparing The Excursion (published in July 1814) with The Prelude (which he had heard recited in 1807), Coleridge was prompted to tell Lady Beaumont in April 1815 that Wordsworth, "having . . . himself convinced himself of Truths, which the generality of persons have either taken for granted from their Infancy, or at least adopted in early life, . . . has attached all their own depth and weight to doctrines and words, which come almost as Truisms or Commonplace to others" (CL, iv 564).9 Wordsworth's penchant for matter-of-factness, which Coleridge first censured in 1802 (above, p. 210) and later numbered among Wordsworth's "defects" in Biographia chapter

22 (BL, ii 101-9), seems to have been the focal point of Coleridge's uneasiness and continuing sense of a radical theoretical difference with Wordsworth in early 1815. Before long, however, a new and influential factor emerged which forced Coleridge's hand, gave firm focus to his understanding [215] of Wordsworth's strengths and weaknesses, and provided the final spur needed to transform the proposed preface to his poems into the Biographia Literaria. This event was the publication of Wordsworth's Poems, including Lyrical Ballads, in two octavo volumes (March 1815). This edition, which was in Coleridge's possession by May 1815 (though we do not know exactly when he received it), was no mere reprint of earlier publications: it contained, as Mary Moorman has said, all the poems and sonnets written since 1807, and the whole was divided into classes according to Wordsworth's peculiar and original plan. A new Preface described this arrangement to the reader, while at the end of the first volume stood an Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, and at the end of the second the preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads was reprinted. It was therefore a very complete exposition of Wordsworth's poetic theory and achievements which was now offered to the world. (WW, ii 269-70) Coleridge could no longer remain silent. Not only had Wordsworth reprinted the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads -- a preface about which Coleridge had had serious reservations since 1802 -but, more grievously, he had in the introductory Preface to the volumes perverted the Coleridgean distinction between fancy and imagination, declaring (inter alia) that "To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy" (PWW, iii 36). To blur the distinction in this fashion, to say that both imagination and fancy are aggregative and associative, was to strike at the heart of Coleridge's theory. Wordsworth's statements made the necessity for a response imperative, for his 1815 Preface rested on a fundamental misinterpretation that could not remain unchallenged, uncorrected unanswered. And so, probably early in June 1815, Coleridge abandoned the idea of a simple preface and set about composing the Biographia Literaria, motivated largely (in John Shawcross's words) by "the desire . . . to state clearly, and defend adequately, his own poetic creed" ( BL, I xcii). To say that Coleridge set about composing the Biographia Literaria in June-July 1815 is, perhaps, a little misleading. His plan during these months was to publish two volumes -- the first an extended "preface" in the form of a literary autobiography, the [216] second an edition of his collected poems. Doubtless this plan was much indebted to (if not wholly inspired by) the format of Wordsworth's 1815 Poems with its various prefaces. The analogy between the two works is borne out by a comment (early August 1815) of Mary Morgan which has been preserved in one of Mary Lamb's letters to Sara Hutchinson. (In 1815 Coleridge was domiciled with the Morgan family at Calne in Wiltshire, where John Morgan served as his "friendly Amanuensis" in the onerous business of preparing works for the press.) Mrs Morgan informed the Lambs (according to Mary Lamb's transcription) that Your old friend Coleridge is very hard at work at the preface to a new Edition which he is just going to publish in the same form as Mr Wordsworth's -- at first the preface was not to exceed five or six pages[;] it has however grown into a work of great importance. I believe Morgan has already written nearly two hundred pages. The title of it is "Auto biographia Literaria": to which are added "Sybilline Leaves", a collection of Poems by the same Author. (LL, iii 192)

It was not finally until mid-September that Coleridge came to regard Biographia Literaria as a work separate from his edition of his poems: "the Biographical Sketches", he told John Gutch on 17 September 1815, "are not a Preface or any thing in the Nature of a Preface, but a Work per se" (CL, iv 585). How are we to account for this change in emphasis? The answer is closely involved with the answer to the second of the two questions posed a moment ago (p. 214): how much (and which parts) of Biographia Literaria had Coleridge composed when he wrote to Dr Brabant at the end of July 1815? In July he told Brabant that the "Autobiographia literaria" was finished and that he had "only the correction of the Mss. to go thro'" (CL, iv 579). At that stage the work, still thought of as a Preface to his poems, comprised (a) sketches of his own opinions on poetry and criticism, (b) a full account of the controversy over Wordsworth's poems and poetic theory, and (c) a "long passage" on the history of associationist doctrine from Aristotle to Hartley and, as well, on the generic difference between fancy and imagination. The work, however, was not "finished", as we know from a letter (10 Aug 1815) from John Morgan to William Hood, written a fortnight after Coleridge's letter to Brabant. Morgan wrote, "At length [217] I am enabled to send you 57 sides of C's work -- the rest (full 100 sides) is finished, and not finished -- that is, there is a metaphysical part of about 5 or 6 sheets which must be revised or rather re-written -- this I trust will be done in a few days" (CL, iv 585 n. 2). In the event, the rewriting of the "metaphysical part" occupied Coleridge through August and into September, the complete manuscript being mailed to Gutch at Bristol on 19 September. Now then, what conclusions may be drawn from this evidence? We may, with considerable confidence I think, say that June-July 1815 saw the composition of the material in chapters 1-3 (the "57 sides" sent off by Morgan on 10 August) and chapters 14-21 together with part10 at least of chapter 22 (the critique of Wordsworth). To this same period (June-July) belong both chapter 4 on the generic difference between fancy and imagination and, in an early form, the historical survey of associationism in chapter 5. Then, in August-September, intending at first only to revise the "metaphysical part of about 5 or 6 sheets" (i.e. chapter 5), Coleridge ended up composing the material in chapters 6-13, the philosophic core of the work. It is probable, as D.M. Fogel has suggested, that it was the "new stress on philosophy" in August-September 1815, when Coleridge was busy enlarging the metaphysical section, that led him to see that the work was in no sense a Preface, but rather "a Work per se".11 Such a hypothesis is supported, indeed made compelling, by statements in Coleridge's letters where a shift in thematic emphasis parallels the emerging sense of the Biographia as a work in its own right. In July, when still conceived of as being a Preface for Sibylline Leaves, it was described as "an Autobiographia literaria, or Sketches of my literary Life & opinions, as far as Poetry and poetical Criticism is concerned" (CL, iv 578-9); but in September, when the work was no longer "a Preface or any thing in the Nature of a Preface, but a Work per se", it was described as being concerned with "My LITERARY LIFE, Principles, and Opinions, chiefly on the Subjects of Poetry and Philosophy, and the Differences at present prevailing concerning both" ( CL, iv 584-5).12 There is one further point -- bearing on the vexed issues of plagiarism and the gnomic definitions of Imagination and Fancy (chs 12 and 13, respectively) -- that needs to be made about the composition of the philosophical section of the Biographia Literaria. This part (chs 613) of the work grew, as we have seen, out of Coleridge's decision in early August to revise and extend the [218] philosophical discussion begun in chapters 4 and 5. But Gutch, the printer,

was anxious to have the whole manuscript so that he could begin setting the work for the press, and there was, consequently, fierce pressure put on Coleridge to finish as quickly as possible. On 10 August Morgan sent Gutch "57 sides of C's work" as a palliative, promised the rest of the manuscript (whose scope and length both he and Coleridge then badly underestimated) "in a few days", and assured Gutch that Coleridge was working hard on the project (CL, iv 585 n. 2). And he was working hard: in the six weeks between Morgan's letter (10 August) and the sending to Gutch of the completed manuscript (19 September) Coleridge wrote and/or dictated to Morgan the equivalent of 128 printed pages (BL, i 74-202). Moreover, early in chapter 12, in a footnote, we find the following remarkable statement: "I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox till I saw the account of it this morning (16th September 1815) in the Monthly Review" (BL, i 165). Only three days later the complete manuscript was mailed to Gutch! Now, whether this means (as Fogel implies) that chapters 12 and 13 were written in three days or whether it means that the footnote only was written on 16 September (three days before the manuscript was sent off), it remains true that chapters 12-13 "were turned out at white heat".13 The entire Biographia, written as it was in under four months, shows signs of hasty composition; but nowhere has this haste left more clearly defined marks than in chapters 12 and 13, the last to be composed, in September 1815. As has long been known, chapter 12 of the Biographia Literaria consists largely of extended passages of translation, some of them verbatim and none of them acknowledged, from F.W.J. Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erlaterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre and System des transcendentalen Idealismus.14 Chapter 12 is not the only place, nor is Schelling the only German philosopher from whom Coleridge plagiarises in the course of Biographia Literaria; but the fact remains that the bulk of unacknowledged borrowings in the book appear in this chapter, which Coleridge must have composed with Schelling's works open before him.15 Speed of execution will not, of course, excuse such behaviour (the case for exculpation rests on other and more complex proofs),16 but it surely does go a long way toward explaining why the borrowings are so extensive at this particular point. The same necessity may legitimately be claimed, in extenuation, [219] for the faltering performance of chapter 13, "On the imagination, or esemplastic power" -- a chapter promising much more than it delivers, though still it delivers a good deal. The ruse of a letter addressed to himself, the deferral of a full discussion to a later work at a later time, the terse and cryptic -albeit brilliant -- paragraphs distinguishing fancy from primary and secondary imagination are all expedients dictated by the pressures of time and an impatient printer. In September 1815 there was no time for reflection or meditation; none for working out complex philosophical arguments without external supports, or for polishing their exposition into clarity and originality of expression; none even, in the case of chapter 13, for providing other than a fleeting glimpse, adumbrated in its oracular conclusion, of the promised deduction of the imagination. Finally, then, in mid-September 1815 the complete manuscript of Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves was at last transmitted to the Bristol printer. The agreed plan was that the work should be printed in two octavo volumes -- the first volume containing the Biographia, the second volume the poems. "The Autobiography", Coleridge told Gutch, "I regard as the main work", and (since it was no longer considered in any sense a "preface" to the poems) "I would fain have it printed in Chapters" (CL, iv 585). Coleridge had himself divided the larger part of the manuscript (chapters 4-22) into chapters, and he gave Gutch instructions on how to divide

the "57 sides" (sent by Morgan on 10 August) in his possession into three chapters ( CL, iv 584). Then, as far as Coleridge was concerned, the task was finished -- a conviction conveyed, with relief and pride, to numerous correspondents in the autumn of 1815 (see CL, iv 588, 591, 597-8, 607-8). Gutch, too, was satisfied: he began printing the Biographia in October and Sibylline Leaves in November 1815.17 By 12 October the first proof-sheets, of Biographia reached Coleridge at Calne (CL, iv 593); in April 1816 Coleridge, now seeing his Christabel volume through the press in London, took up what was to prove a lifelong residence with the Gillmans in Highgate, in an effort to control his opium habit; and meanwhile, back in Bristol, the printing of the earlier work was proceeding smoothly: by May 1816 the first twelve chapters of Biographia Literaria and almost the whole of Sibylline Leaves had been printed. All was well -- or so, at least, it seemed. 18 The storm broke in July 1816. Two months earlier, with the printing well under way, Gutch had discovered that the planned [220] two volumes would be disproportionate in size, the Biographia volume being much longer than the Sibylline Leaves volume. (Why this problem was not spotted before the spring of 1816 remains a mystery.) It was decided, in any event, to solve the difficulty by publishing Biographia Literaria in two volumes (CL, iv 646n.) and Sibylline Leaves separately as a third volume. This decision, made in early May 1816, was based on Gutch's "positive assurance" (CL, iv 660) that the manuscript as it stood contained enough material for two volumes. Coleridge, though "incredulous", agreed (after consultation with Morgan and John Murray, the London publisher) to split the Biographia into two volumes, the first to contain chapters 1-13, the second chapters 14-22. There was not, however, enough material in Chapters 14-22 to make a second volume. Gutch, realising that a blunder had been made in estimating copy, informed Coleridge in July 1816 that more material was required to flesh out the second volume of Biographia. Coleridge, who had since September 1815 considered the work finished and had, consequently, turned his energies to other projects, was angered and perplexed by the news: "I have no way to remedy it," he exclaimed in exasperation, "but by writing a hundred and fifty pages additional -- on what, I am left to discover" (CL, iv 661). By mid-July the printing of the second volume had progressed as far as page 14 of chapter 22. The additional material, therefore, would have to be tacked on to the end of a completed work, most of which had already been printed. What, indeed, could he be expected to do at this point? What could be added without distortion, without destroying the structural and thematic integrity of the book he had already written? And how, having recently agreed with the firm of Gale and Fenner to write a lay sermon and prepare a new edition of The Friend, was he to find the time to compose such extensive additions? Relations with Gutch deteriorated rapidly through the summer and autumn of 1816. There were threats and angry words on both sides. Gutch stopped the printing of Biographia midway through chapter 22 and, in December 1816, sent Coleridge a bill for the printing costs, refusing to surrender any of the printed sheets until the account was paid and threatening to denounce Coleridge publicly for failure to complete the work unless a speedy settlement was reached. At this point Coleridge's London publishers, Gale and Fenner, took over the correspondence. After months of contentious negotiations, a financial compromise was reached and, [221] in April 1817, Gutch released the printed sheets and the manuscript of the work to the London firm. It was not, however, until May 1817 that a final settlement was achieved and the rights to Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves passed to Gale and Fenner.

In the meantime Coleridge was still left with the problem of what to use in fleshing out the second volume of Biographia Literaria. Although he spoke of getting on with this task as early as September 1816 (CL, iv 679), he seems to have made no constructive steps until the spring of 1817. Partly, he was too discouraged and the fate of the work too much in doubt to justify supplying new material in 1816; partly, he was prevented by the pressure of other work, for in the period September 1816-March 1817 he was hard at work composing and seeing through the press his Statesman's Manual (published in December 1816) and his Lay Sermon (published in March 1817); and partly, too, there was ill health -- a "sinking down of my Health that made it so perplexing for me to remedy" the printer's blunder (CL, iv 704). At length, however, in February 1817 he addressed himself seriously to the problem of how to "fill the Gap". At first, although reluctantly, he planned to use his play Zapolya; but, by 14 March, he had decided to substitute his "German Letters" (CL, iv 709), which had first appeared in The Friend in 1809.19 But the addition of these letters (entitled "Satyrane's Letters") still left the second volume short of the required length. Consequently, Coleridge supplied some other items: (a) a reprint of his review of C.R. Maturin's Bertram from The Courier,20 which became chapter 23 of the Biographia Literaria; (b) a concluding chapter (chap 24), written in the spring of 1817, in which he answered the critics of his Christabel and Statesman's Manual 21 and stated his own beliefs "concerning the true evidences of Christianity"; and (c) perhaps a revision, padded out with quotations, of the last two-thirds of chapter 22 (see n. 10 above). With these additions -- most of them mere makeweights -- the work was at last ready for the press. By May 1817 Gale and Fenner had secured the publication rights from Gutch. The printing of the second volume of Biographia Literaria was resumed at page 145, incorporating the new materials supplied by Coleridge. At long last, in July 1817, twenty-three months after Coleridge had transmitted the manuscript to Gutch in Bristol, Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves were released for sale. "It sometimes happens", Coleridge observed, "that we are punished for our faults [222] by incidents, in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have always felt the severest punishment" (BL, ii 207).

a. Hamaftial Tragic Failing No passage in The Poetics with the exception of the Catharsis phrase has attracted so much critical attention as his ideal of the tragic hero. The function of a tragedy is to arouse the emotions of pity and fear and Aristotle deduces the qualities of his hero from this function. He should be good, but not perfect, for the fall of a perfect man from happiness into misery, would be unfair and repellent and will not arouse pity. Similarly, an utterly wicked person passing from happiness to misery may satisfy our moral sense, but will lack proper tragic qualities. His fall will be well-deserved and according to justice. It excites neither pity nor fear. Thus entirely good and utterly wicked persons are not suitable to be tragic heroes. Similarly, according to Aristotelian law, a saint would be unsuitable as a tragic hero. He is on the side of the moral order and hence his fall shocks and repels. Besides, his martyrdom is a

spiritual victory which drowns the feeling of pity. Drama, on the other hand, requires for its effectiveness a militant and combative hero. It would be important to remember that Aristotles conclusions are based on the Greek drama and he is lying down the qualifications of an ideal tragic hero. He is here discussing what is the very best and not what is good. Overall, his views are justified, for it requires the genius of a Shakespeare to arouse sympathy for an utter villain, and saints as successful tragic heroes have been extremely rare. Having rejected perfection as well as utter depravity and villainy, Aristotle points out that: The ideal tragic hero must be an intermediate kind of person, a man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice or depravity but by some error of judgment. The ideal tragic hero is a man who stands midway between the two extremes. He is not eminently good or just, though he inclines to the side of goodness. He is like us, but raised above the ordinary level by a deeper vein of feeling or heightened powers of intellect or will. He is idealized, but still he has so much of common humanity as to enlist our interest and sympathy. The tragic hero is not evil or vicious, but he is also not perfect and his disaster is brought upon him by his own fault. The Greek word used here is Hamartia meaning missing the mark. He falls not because of the act of outside agency or evil but because of Hamartia or miscalculation on his part. Hamartia is not a moral failing and it is unfortunate that it was translated as tragic flaw by Bradley. Aristotle himself distinguishes Hamartia from moral failing. He means by it some error or judgment. He writes that the cause of the heros fall must lie not in depravity, but in some error or Hamartia on his part. He does not assert or deny anything about the connection of Hamartia with heros moral failings. It may be accompanied by moral imperfection, but it is not itself a moral imperfection, and in the purest tragic situation the suffering hero is not morally to blame. Thus Hamartia is an error or miscalculation, but the error may arise from any of the three ways: It may arise from ignorance of some fact or circumstance, or secondly, it may arise from hasty or careless view of the special case, or thirdly, it may be an error voluntary, but not deliberate, as acts committed in anger. Else and Martian Ostwald interpret Hamartia and say that the hero has a tendency to err created by lack of knowledge and he may commit a series of errors. This tendency to err characterizes the hero from the beginning and at the crisis of the play it is complemented by the recognition scene, which is a sudden change from ignorance to knowledge. In fact, Hamartia is a word with various shades of meaning and has been interpreted by different critics. Still, all serious modern Aristotelian scholarship agreed that Hamartia is not moral imperfection. It is an error of judgment, whether arising from ignorance of some material circumstance or from rashness of temper or from some passion. It may even be a character, for

the hero may have a tendency to commit errors of judgment and may commit series of errors. This last conclusion is borne out by the play Oedipus Tyrannus to which Aristotle refers time and again and which may be taken to be his ideal. In this play, heros life is a chain or errors, the most fatal of all being his marriage with his mother. If King Oedipus is Aristotles ideal hero, we can say with Butcher that: His conception of Hamartia includes all the three meanings mentioned above, which in English cannot be covered by a single term. Hamartia is an error, or a series of errors, whether morally culpable or not, committed by an otherwise noble person, and these errors derive him to his doom. The tragic irony lies in the fact that hero may err mistakenly without any evil intention, yet he is doomed no less than immorals who sin consciously. He has Hamartia and as a result his very virtues hurry him to his ruin. Says Butcher: Othello in the modern drama, Oedipus in the ancient, are the two most conspicuous examples of ruin wrought by character, noble indeed, but not without defects, acting in the dark and, as it seemed, for the best. Aristotle lays down another qualification for the tragic hero. He must be, of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity. He must be a well-reputed individual occupying a position of lofty eminence in society. This is so because Greed tragedy, with which alone Aristotle was familiar, was written about a few distinguished royal families. Aristotle considers eminence as essential for the tragic hero. But Modern drama demonstrates that the meanest individual can also serve as a tragic hero, and that tragedies of Sophoclean grandeur can be enacted even in remote country solitudes. However, Aristotles dictum is quite justified on the principle that, higher the state, the great er the fall that follows, or because heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes, while the death of a beggar passes unnoticed. But it should be remembered that Aristotle nowhere says that the hero should be a king or at least royally descended. They were the Renaissance critics who distorted Aristotle and made the qualification more rigid and narrow.

The term sphoTa is etymologically derived from the root sphuT, which means 'to burst', or become suddenly rent asunder (with a sound) [i]. b. Sphota The word sphoTa is explained in two ways [ii].
1. Naagesha BhaTTa defines sphoTa as sphuTati prakaashate'rtho'smaad iti sphoTaH (that, from which the meaning bursts forth, that is, shines forth. In other words, the word

that expresses a meaning, or the process of expressing a meaning through a word is called sphoTa. 2. SphoTa, according to Maadhava, is that which is manifested or revealed by the phonemes: sphuTyate vyajyate varNairiti sphoTaH.

2. A UNIQUE CONTRIBUTION OF INDIAN GRAMMARIANS Gaurinatha Shastri suggested that the original Greek conception of logos best conveys the meaning of sphoTa: 'The fact that logos stand for an idea as well as a word wonderfully approximates to the concept of sphoTa' [iii]. The concept of sphoTa is the unique contribution of Indian grammarians to the philosophy of language. This is the theory, which explains the working of the speech process. We do not have sufficient evidence, in our hand to establish as to who was the first founder of the sphoTa theory. Haradatta in his PadamaNjari and Naagesha BhaTTa in his sphoTavaada claim that the sphoTaayana was the first founder of the sphoTa doctrine [iv]. 3. VARIOUS VIEWS ON SPHOTA VyaaDi, the author of samgraha, might have recorded some discussion about the sphoTa theory; as the distinction between the praakrta dhvani and vaikrta dhvani mentioned in the Vaakya Padeeya is supposed to have been made by him [v]. Some scholars believe that the indirect reference to sphoTa theory is found in the writings of AudumbaraayaNa quoted by Yaaska in his Nirukta [vi]. Here it should be noted that Yaaska did not use the term sphoTa and he seems to have known little about it. AudumbaraayaNa also does not mention the term sphoTa directly. His awareness of sphoTa is speculated on the basis of the sphoTa concept of Bhartrhari. (See my earlier articles in Language in India, The Notion of Vaak in Vaakyapadeeya and Bhartrhari -the Father of Indian Semantics.) Some grammarians even claimed that the germs of the sphoTa theory are present in PaaNini's ASTaadhyaayee [vii], as he mentions the name of sphoTaayana. The specific mention of the name sphoTaayana, neither sufficiently indicates that PaaNini knew anything similar to the sphoTa theory, nor does it point out that this doctrine originally belonged to the sage sphoTaayana. The Vaartikakaara, Kaatyaayana does not mention the word sphoTa in his Vt. He only established the great principle that shabda is nitya ("eternal, or permanent"), artha is nitya, and their mutual relation i.e. vaacya- vaacaka-bhaava is also nitya [viii]. While explaining upon PaaNinian rule taparastatkaalasya, P.1.1.70, he says that the letters are fixed and the style of vrtti depends upon the speech habits of the speaker. This statement of Kaatyaayana, regarding the nature of word and the difference in tempo takes us near to the sphoTa doctrine. 4. PATANJALI ON SPHOTA -- THE FLAME AND THE FIRE

Here it should be admitted that though earlier thinkers talk of the eternal and pervasive character of word, as an element or unit, the clear picture of sphoTa theory is not found before PataNjali. He discuses the idea of sphoTa, under P-1.1.170 (taparastatkaalasya), and P-8.2.18 (krpo ro laH), where the word sphoTa is not applied to the meaning bearing element, but to a permanent aspect of phonemes. According to PataNjali, sphoTa is not identical with shabda. It is rather a permanent element of shabda, whereas dhvani represents its non-permanent aspect. The sphoTa is not audible like dhvani [ix]. It is manifested by the articulated sounds. The dhvani element of speech may differ in phonetic value with reference to the variation in the utterance of different speakers. Differences in speed of utterance and time distinctions are attributes of dhvani, which can not affect the nature of sphoTa revealed by the sound. When a sound passes from a speaker's lips, sphoTa is revealed instantaneously. But before the listener comprehends anything, dhvani elements manifest the permanent element of shabda. So, sphoTa comes first and manifesting dhvani also continues to exist after the revelation of sphoTa. That is why PataNjali remarks that dhvani-s are actualized and euphemeral elements and attributes of sphoTa [x]. PataNjali points out that the sphoTa, which is revealed by the articulate sounds, can be presented through phonemes only. A phoneme (vowel) which represents sphoTa remains the same in three modes of utterance, i.e. slow, fast and faster, whereas dhvani (articulate sound) differs in different utterances [xi]. It is just like the distance, which remains the same, even if it is covered by various means, which travel slow, fast, and faster. Regarding the unaffected nature of sphoTa, PataNjali gives the analogy of a drumbeat. When a drum is struck, one drumbeat may travel twenty feet, another thirty feet, another forty feet and so on. Though the sounds produced by beating the drum differ, the drumbeat remains the same. SphoTa is precisely of such and such a size, the increase and decrease in step is caused by the difference in the duration of dhvani [xii]. According to PataNjali, sphoTa is a conceptual entity or generic feature of articulated sounds, either in the form of isolated phonemes or a series of phonemes. It is a permanent element of physical sounds which are transitory in nature, and which vary in length, tempo and pitch of the speaker. It is an actualized replica of euphemeral sounds. 5. BHARTRHARI ON SPHOTA In interpreting the doctrine of sphoTa, Bhartrhari follows the tradition handed down by his predecessors like PataNjali and others. While explaining the notion of sphoTa, he not only gives his own view but also gives the views of others (using the quotative markers, kecit and apare) [xiii], without mentioning their names. Traditionally it is believed that they may be MImamsakas and Naiyaayikas.

The notion of sphota is part of Bhartrhari's monistic and idealistic metaphysical theory. The term sphoTa occurs nine times in the BrahmakaaNDa [xiv], the use of the term shabda [xv] in different senses namely, pada, vaakya, sphoTa, dhvani, naada, praakrtadhvani, and vaikrtadhvani pose certain difficulties in determining the actual nature of sphoTa. 6. NATURE OF SPHOTA Bhartrhari begins the discussion of the nature of sphoTa with the observation that words or sentences can be considered under two aspects as sound pattern, or its generic feature. He recognizes two entities, both of which may be called shabda, one is the underlying cause of the articulated sounds, while the other is used to express the meaning. Thus it is said:
dvaavupaadaanashabdeSu shabdau eko nimittam shabdaanaamaparo'rthe prayujyate. Bk. 44// shabdavido viduH

The former, called sphoTa, is the conceptual entity and permanent element of word, whereas the latter, called dhvani, is a sound pattern, which is the external aspect of the language symbol. Thus, sphoTa which is mental impression of an audible sound pattern, is the cause of that sound pattern. 7. TWO VIEWS REGARDING THE RELATION OF SPHOTA AND DHVANI Bhartrhari records two totally contradictory views about these two different elements of the word - - SphoTa and Dhvani. According to some, there is an absolute difference between these two elements, with cause and effect relationship between them. This agrees with the view held by the logician, who assumed total distinction between the cause and effect. According to the second view, the difference between these elements is mere psychological and not real. This is said to be the view held by Vedaantins, Saamkhya, and grammarians, who believe that the effect is inherited in the cause [xvi]. SphoTa, according to Bhartrhari, is always intimately related to dhvani. As soon as the sounds are produced the sphoTa is cognized instantly. Thus, sounds are manifesters and sphoTa is manifested [xvii]. It is the articulate sound, which reaches the listener's ear in the form of the sphoTa. To put it differently, sphoTa is a replica of dhvani having phonetic features. That's why it is an "auditory image of the sound" [xviii]. According to Bhartrhari, sphoTa [xix] is one and without sequence. Therefore, neither the question of parts nor the order can arise in the conception of sphoTa. It is sound or naada, which is produced at different moments of time, and the notions of sequence of plurality that really pertain to sounds are wrongly attributed to sphoTa.

Bhartrhari elucidates this point with the illustration of reflection. The reflection [xx] of moon in the water, though actually immovable, appears to be moving due to the movement in the water. Here is the property of water; that is, movability is superimposed on the reflected image of the moon. Similarly, sequence which is a property of sound is superimposed on the sphoTa which in reality is without sequence. The temporal distinction [xxi] and variations in the speed of utterance [xxii] are the properties, which provide many varieties and, thereby they explain continuity of the perception of sphoTa. But the properties of the secondary sound do not affect the intrinsic form of the sphoTa. 8. THREE VIEWS ON THE RELATION BETWEEN SPHOTA AND DHVANI [xxiii] First View The sound, which is closely bound up with the sphoTa, is not perceived separately, like color, which is not separately perceived from the object. Second View The sound, without getting itself perceived, causes the perception of the sphoTa, as the sense organ and their qualities, which being themselves unperceived, cause the perception of objects. Third View Sound is also perceived without giving rise to the perception of the form of sphoTa. In other words, the perception of sound is not regarded as identical with the perception of the sphoTa. 9. THREE VIEWS OF BHARTRHARI ON SPHOTA Bhartrhari records three different views on the nature of the sphoTa. He says that, according to some, the term sphoTa stands for the initial articulated sounds produced by the various degrees of contacts of articulatory organs with the point of articulation. The sounds, which are produced, from the initial sounds that spread in all directions in the two ways, that is, 'vIcItaraNganyaaya' (like ripples) and 'kadambagolakanyaaya' (like the blossom of kadamba tree). They are like the reflections of the original sound. The first sound in each chain is the result of the vibration of the vocal organs, while the others are produced, not by the movement of the vocal organs but by the sounds immediately preceding them. The former is the sphoTa and the later is called 'dhvaniH'. Thus, according to the thinkers of this view, even after the organs have ceased to vibrate, other sounds also originate from the sphoTa like the series of flames which stream forth from other flames [xxiv].

The second view put forward by Bhartrhari is that both [xxv] dhvani and the sphoTa are said to be produced at the same time. This is explained by the analogy of the flame and the light. The flame and light are produced at the same moment. However, from a distance we see the light without seeing the flame. In the same manner, from the distance we may perceive the sound and not the sphoTa. According to this theory there is no interval between sphoTa and dhvani. According to the third view, sphoTa stand for the universal concept, which is manifested by many individual sounds. The varied individual sounds are called dhvanis, while the universal nature of these varied individual sounds is considered to be sphoTa [xxvi]. 10. THE PROCESS OF COMMUNICATION - - vaagvyavahaara The sphoTa remains in the intellect of both the speaker and the listener with no motion before its manifestation. There is an inter-link between sound and sphoTa, as soon as the speaker produces the sound through the articulatory organs, the sphoTa is revealed. But the listener cannot understand sphoTa immediately. Each sound unit contributes some thing to the total perception of sphoTa. The listener receives the phonemes in a sequence and grasps the form of a word in his mind, when the last phoneme is heard. The last sound helps the listener to recognize the sphoTa absolutely. This entire process of manifesting sphoTa is compared with the act of painting. Just as an artist reproduces his mental [xxvii] idea of the form of an object on a cloth, similarly the speaker reproduces the mental verbal image of a word through articulated phonemes. 11. FOUR STEPS IN THE PROCESS OF COMMUNICATION The process of communication (vaagvyavahaara) is the combination of four steps [xxviii].
1. The speaker selects in his mind a particular word form, which is related to particular meaning. 2. The sound-form of the word is revealed through the phonetic act. 3. The sounds are emitted in sequence by the speaker and are received by the listener in sequence. 4. From these sounds, a listener receives the mental idea of the uttered word.

12. SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BHARTRHARI'S SPHOTA THEORY Later grammarians treat sphoTa as meaning-conveying power of the language. S.D Joshi after studying carefully all the nine occurrences of the term sphoTa in the VP, has stated that:
Bhartrhari does not say that sphoTa is an indivisible entity. He does not treat it as a meaningful aspect of the language. The term does not occur in connection with the sentence and word in

the second and third kaaNDa of the Vaakyapadeeya. It is always related to the sound (dhvani). The idea of the indivisibility of sphoTa can be traced in BrahmakaaNDa 74 [xxix].

Accordingly, 'there are no phonemes in the word nor are their parts in the phonemes. There is no absolute difference of the words from the sentence' [xxx]. On the basis of the verse, S.D. Joshi states that significative units cannot be broken into parts. But phonemes have no relation with the meaning. He argues that an indivisible nature is assigned to sphoTa by the latter grammarians, which goes against the intention of Bhartrhari. They have deliberately interpreted the term varNa sphoTa in the sense of stem, roots, suffixes, etc., to justify the indivisibility and meaningfulness of sphoTa. Thus, they have imposed their own idea on Bhartrhari [xxxi]. Bhartrhari's statement pointed out that the shabda is self-revealing, that is, it reveals its own phonetic form as well as the meaning. The later grammarians have wrongly applied this self-revealing character of a word to sphoTa. But Bhartrhari does not say that sphoTa is self-revealing [xxxii]. According to S. D. Joshi, the sphoTa is comprehended by the listener through the sound produced by the speaker. The sphoTa represents a class of individual sounds, whereas dhvani represents a particular sound. The sphoTa is a sound or a type of sound, which may or may not be meaningful. The meaning-conveying nature of the word in the BrahmakaaNDa Verse 44 has been wrongly identified with the feature of sphoTa by the later grammarians and some modern scholars [xxxiii]. Joshi is fully justified in his interpretation of Bhartrhari's views on sphota, as this interpretation also agrees with that of PataNjali's description of sphoTa. 13. SUMMARY To sum up, there is no agreement among the scholars as to who was the profounder of the sphoTa theory. The first systematic discussion on sphoTa is found in PataNjali's MahaabhaaSya. According to PataNjali, sphoTa is a conceptual entity or generic feature of the articulated sound. However, there is no such other ancient work, which deals with the nature of sphoTa as satisfactorily as does Bhartrhari's Vaakyapadeeya. According to Bhartrhari, sphoTa is an auditory image of sound. It is indivisible and without inner-sequence. It does not stand for the meaning-bearing aspect of the word. It is not over and above the sound. Many grammarians and modern scholars have misunderstood Bhartrhari's position on the nature of sphoTa. They misunderstood sphoTa to be the self-revealing and meaning conveying power of the language. In fact, sphoTa merely represents the class of individual sounds, whereas dhvani represents a particular sound. The sphoTa is a sound or a type of sound, which may or may not be meaningful. The meaning-conveying nature of the word in the Bk.44 has

been wrongly identified with the feature of sphoTa by the later grammarians and some modern scholars.

c. Visual parts of a tragedy Aristotle now narrows his focus to examine tragedy exclusively. In order to do so, he provides a definition of tragedy that we can break up into seven parts: (1) it involves mimesis; (2) it is serious; (3) the action is complete and with magnitude; (4) it is made up of language with the "pleasurable accessories" of rhythm and harmony; (5) these "pleasurable accessories" are not used uniformly throughout, but are introduced in separate parts of the work, so that, for instance, some bits are spoken in verse and other bits are sung; (6) it is performed rather than narrated; and (7) it arouses the emotions of pity and fear and accomplishes a katharsis (purification or purgation) of these emotions.

Next, Aristotle asserts that any tragedy can be divided into six component parts, and that every tragedy is made up of these six parts with nothing else besides. There is (a) the spectacle, which is the overall visual appearance of the stage and the actors. The means of imitation (language, rhythm, and harmony) can be divided into (b) melody, and (c) diction, which has to do with the composition of the verses. The agents of the action can be understood in terms of (d) character and (e) thought. Thought seems to denote the intellectual qualities of an agent while character seems to denote the moral qualities of an agent. Finally, there is (f) the plot, or mythos, which is the combination of incidents and actions in the story. Aristotle argues that, among these six, the plot is the most important. The characters serve to advance the action of the story, not vice versa. The ends we pursue in life, our happiness and our misery, all take the form of action. That is, according to Aristotle, happiness consists in a certain kind of activity rather than in a certain quality of character. Diction and thought are also less significant than plot: a series of well-written speeches have nothing like the force of a well-structured tragedy. Further, Aristotle suggests, the most powerful elements in a tragedy, the peripeteia and the anagnorisis, are elements of the plot. Lastly, Aristotle notes that forming a solid plot is far more difficult than creating good characters or diction. Having asserted that the plot is the most important of the six parts of tragedy, he ranks the remainder as follows, from most important to least: character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. Character reveals the individual motivations of the characters in the play, what they want or don't want, and how they react to certain situations, and this is more important to Aristotle than thought, which deals on a more universal level with reasoning and general truths. Melody and spectacle are simply pleasurable accessories, but melody is more important to the tragedy than spectacle: a pretty

spectacle can be arranged without a play, and usually matters of set and costume aren't the occupation of the poet anyway. Analysis Aristotle's definition of tragedy at the beginning of this chapter is supposed to summarize what he has already said, but it is the first mention of the katharsis. The Greek word katharsis was usually used either by doctors to talk about purgation, the flushing of contaminants out of the system, or by priests to talk about religious purification. In either case, it seems to refer to a therapeutic process whereby the body or mind expels contaminants and becomes clean and healthy. Determining exactly what role katharsis is meant to play in tragedy is somewhat more difficult. First, we might ask what exactly katharsis is in reference to tragedy. The idea, it seems, is that watching a tragedy arouses the emotions of pity and fear in us and then purges these emotions. But, by virtue of mimesis, we aren't feeling real pity or real fear. I may feel pity for Oedipus when he learns that he has killed his father and married his mother, but this is a different kind of pity than the pity I feel for the homeless or for those living in war zones. I know that Oedipus is not a real person and that no one is really suffering when I watch Oedipus suffer. As a result, I can empathize with the character of Oedipus without feeling any kind of guilt or obligation to help him out. Watching tragedy has a cathartic effect because I can let go of the emotional tension built up in me as I leave the theater. I am able to experience profound emotion without having its consequences stay with me and harden me to subsequent emotional shocks.

Second, we might ask to what extent katharsis is the purpose of tragedy, and to what extent it is an occasional effect of tragedy. The question of in what way art may be good for us is a very difficult question to answer. The best art (and this applies to Greek tragedy) is not didactic: it does not try to tell us outright how we ought or ought not to behave. At the same time, there is definitely a lot we can learn from a subtle appreciation of art. The value of art, on the whole, seems to stem more from its ability to arouse emotion and awareness on an abstract, general level, rather than to teach us particular truths. Oedipus Rex is valuable because it engenders a certain state of mind, not because it teaches us to avoid marrying older women whose family histories are uncertain. Though katharsis may be an important effect of tragedy, it is hardly the reason for which poets write tragedies. If that were so, poets would be little more than emotional therapists. Again, Aristotle is writing as an observer more than as a theorist. He has observed that tragedy has a cathartic effect on its viewers, but he is not trying to enunciate this as the end goal of all tragedy. The other important concept we encounter in this chapter is that of mythos. While "plot" is a pretty good translation of this word in reference to tragedy, mythos can be applied

to sculpture, music, or any other art form. The mythos of a piece of art is the way it is structured and organized in order to make a coherent statement. Thus, when Aristotle speaks about the "plot" of a tragedy, he is not just referring to who did what to whom, but is speaking about how the events in the story come together to bring out deeper, general themes. Plot, then, is central to a tragedy, because that is where, if at all, its value lies. If character were central to tragedy, we would be watching Oedipus Rex in order to learn something about Oedipus, about what makes him tick, or how he reacts in different situations. The character of Oedipus in itself is uninteresting: why should we care about the personality of someone who never existed? The value of Oedipus lies in what we can learn about ourselves and our world from observing his fate. What we learn from a tragedythe effect it has on usresults from the way it is structured to draw our minds toward general truths and ideas; that is, from its mythos. d. Intentional Fallacy

THE CLAIM of the author's "intention" upon the critic's judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions, notably in the debate entitled The Personal Heresy, between Professors Lewis and Tillyard. But it seems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to any widespread questioning. The present writers, in a short article entitled "Intention" for a Dictionary1 of literary criticism, raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implications at any length. We argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes. It is a principle which accepted or rejected points to the polar opposites of classical "imitation" and romantic expression. It entails many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its allusiveness. There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic's approach will not be qualified by his view of "intention." 3

"Intention," as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance. "In order to judge the poet's performance, we must know what he intended." Intention is design or plan in the author's mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author's attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write. We begin our discussion with a series of propositions summarized and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic. 1. A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a head, not out of a bat. Yet to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or

intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance. 2. One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about intention. How is he to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem-for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem. "Only one caveat must be borne in mind," says an eminent intentionalist2 in a moment when his theory repudiates itself; "the poet's aim must be judged at the moment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the poem itself." 3. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer. "A poem should not mean but be." A poem can be only through its meaning-since its medium is words-yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant. Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrevelant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and "bugs" from machinery. 4

In this respect poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. They are more abstract than poetry. 4. The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul rather than a physical object like an apple. But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universalized). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference. 5. There is a sense in which an author, by revision, may better achieve his original intention. But it is a very abstract sense. He intended to write a better work, or a better work of a certain kind, and now has done it. But it follows that his former concrete intention was not his intention. "He's the man we were in search of, that's true," says Hardy's rustic constable, "and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted." "Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own." He has accurately diagnosed two forms of irresponsibility, one of which he prefers. Our view is yet different. The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. What is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the general science of psychology.

A critic of our Dictionary article, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, has argued3 that there are two kinds of inquiry about a work of art: (1) whether the artist achieved his intentions; (2) whether the work of art "ought ever to have been undertaken 5

at all" and so "whether it is worth preserving." Number (2), Coomaraswamy maintains, is not "criticism of any work of art qua work of art," but is rather moral criticism; number (1) is artistic criticism. But we maintain that (2) need not be moral criticism: that there is another way of deciding whether works of art are worth preserving and whether, in a sense, they "ought" to have been undertaken, and this is the way of objective criticism of works of art as such, the way which enables us to distinguish between a skillful murder and a skillful poem. A skillful murder is an example which Coomaraswamy uses, and in his system the difference between the murder and the poem is simply a "moral" one, not an "artistic" one, since each if carried out according to plan is "artistically" successful. We maintain that (2) is an inquiry of more worth than (1), and since (2) and not (1) is capable of distinguishing poetry from murder, the name "artistic criticism" is properly given to (2).

II It is not so much a historical statement as a definition to say that the intentional fallacy is a romantic one. When a rhetorician of the first century A.D. writes: "Sublimity is the echo of a great soul," or when he tells us that "Homer enters into the sublime actions of his heroes" and "shares the full inspiration of the combat," we shall not be surprised to find this rhetorician considered as a distant harbinger of romanticism and greeted in the warmest terms by Saintsbury. One may wish to argue whether Longinus should be called romantic, but there can hardly be a doubt that in one important way he is. Goethe's three questions for "constructive criticism" are "What did the author set out to do? Was his plan reasonable and sensible, and how far did he succeed in carrying it out?" If one leaves out the middle question, one has in effect the system of Croce-the culmination and crowning philosophic expression of romanticism. The beautiful is the successful intuition-expression, and the ugly is the unsuccessful; the intuition or private part of art is the aesthetic fact, and the medium or public part is not the subject of aesthetic at all. 6 The Madonna of Cimabue is still in the Church of Santa Maria Novella; but does she speak to the visitor of to-day as to the Florentines of the thirteenth century? Historical interpretation labours . . . to reintegrate in us the psychological conditions which have changed in the course of history. It . . . enables us to see a work of art (a physical object) as its author saw it in the moment of production.4

The first italics are Croce's, the second ours. The upshot of Croce's system is an ambiguous emphasis on history. With such passages as a point of departure a critic may write a nice analysis of the meaning or "spirit" of a play by Shakespeare or Corneille-a process that involves close historical study but remains aesthetic criticism-or he may, with equal plausibility, produce an essay in sociology, biography, or other kinds of nonaesthetic history. III. I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts.... I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them. . . . Will you believe me? . . . there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration. That reiterated mistrust of the poets which we hear from Socrates may have been part of a rigorously ascetic view in which we hardly wish to participate, yet Plato's Socrates saw a truth about the poetic mind which the world no longer commonly sees-so much criticism, and that the most inspirational and most affectionately remembered, has proceeded from the poets themselves. Certainly the poets have had something to say that the critic and professor could not say; their message has been more exciting: that poetry should come as naturally as leaves to a tree, that poetry is the lava of the imagination, or that it is emotion recollected in tranquillity. But it is necessary that we realize the character and authority of such testimony. There 7

is only a fine shade of difference between such expressions and a kind of earnest advice that authors often give. Thus Edward Young, Carlyle, Walter Pater: I know two golden rules from ethics, which are no less golden in Composition, than in life. 1. Know thyself; 2dly, Reverence thyself. This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me flere, is applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true, if you would be believed. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within. And Housman's little handbook to the poetic mind yields this illustration:

Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon-beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life-I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once. This is the logical terminus of the series already quoted. Here is a confession of how poems were written which would do as a definition of poetry just as well as "emotion recollected in tranquillity"-and which the young poet might equally well take to heart as a practical rule. Drink a pint of beer, relax, go walking, think on nothing in particular, look at things, surrender yourself to yourself, search for the truth in your own soul, listen to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the vraie verit. It is probably true that all this is excellent advice for poets. The young imagination fired by Wordsworth and Carlyle is probably closer to the verge of producing a poem than the mind 8

of the student who has been sobered by Aristotle or Richards. The art of inspiring poets, or at least of inciting something like poetry in young persons, has probably gone further in our day than ever before. Books of creative writing such as those issued from the Lincoln School are interesting evidence of what a child can do. 5 All this, however, would appear to belong to an art separate from criticism-to a psychological discipline, a system of self-development, a yoga, which the young poet perhaps does well to notice, but which is something different from the public art of evaluating poems. Coleridge and Arnold were better critics than most poets have been, and if the critical tendency dried up the poetry in Arnold and perhaps in Coleridge, it is not inconsistent with our argument, which is that judgment of poems is different from the art of producing them. Coleridge has given us the classic "anodyne" story, and tells what he can about the genesis of a poem which he calls a "psychological curiosity," but his definitions of poetry and of the poetic quality "imagination" are to be found elsewhere and in quite other terms. It would be convenient if the passwords of the intentional school, "sincerity," "fidelity," "spontaneity, I'll authenticity," "genuineness," "originality," could be equated with terms such as "integrity," "relevance," "unity," "function," "maturity," "subtlety ... .. adequacy," and other more precise terms of evaluation -in short, if "expression" always meant aesthetic achievement. But this is not so. "Aesthetic" art, says Professor Curt Ducasse, an ingenious theorist of expression, is the conscious objectification of feelings, in which an intrinsic part is the critical moment. The artist corrects the objectification when it is not adequate. But this may mean that the earlier attempt was not successful in objectifying the self, or "it may also mean that it was a successful objectification of a self which, when it confronted us clearly, we disowned and repudiated in favor of another."6 What is the standard by which we disown or accept the self? Professor Ducasse

does not say. Whatever it may be, however, this standard is an element in the definition of art which will not 9

reduce to terms of objectification. The evaluation of the work of art remains public; the work is measured against something outside the author. IV There is criticism of poetry and there is author psychology, which when applied to the present or future takes the form of inspirational promotion; but author psychology can be historical too, and then we have literary biography, a legitimate and attractive study in itself, one approach, as Professor Tillyard would argue, to personality, the poem being only a parallel approach. Certainly it need not be with a derogatory purpose that one points out personal studies, as distinct from poetic studies, in the realm of literary scholarship. Yet there is danger of confusing personal and poetic studies; and there is the fault of writing the personal as if it were poetic. There is a difference between internal and external evidence for the meaning of a poem. And the paradox is only verbal and superficial that what is (1) internal is also public: it is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture; while what is (2) external is private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations (in journals, for example, or letters or reported conversations) about how or why the poet wrote the poem-to what lady, while sitting on what lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother. There is (3) an intermediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or about private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member. The meaning of words is the history of words, and the biography of an author, his use of a word, and the associations which the word had for him, are part of the words history and meaning.7 But the three types of evidence, especially (2) and (3), shade into one another so subtly that it is not always easy to draw a line between examples, 10

and hence arises the difficulty for criticism. The use of biographical evidence need not involve intentionalism, because while it may be evidence of what the author intended, it may also be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character of his utterance. On the other hand, it may not be all this. And a critic who is concerned with evidence of type (1) and moderately with that of type (3) will in the long run produce a different sort of comment from that of the critic who is concerned with (2) and with (3) where it shades into (2). The whole glittering parade of Professor Lowes' Road to Xanadu, for instance, runs along the border between types (2) and (3) or boldly traverses the romantic region of (2). "'Kubla Khan,"' says Professor Lowes, "is the fabric of a vision, but every image that rose up in its weaving had passed that way before. And it would

seem that there is nothing haphazard or fortuitous in their return." This is not quite clear-not even when Professor Lowes explains that there were clusters of associations, like hooked atoms, which were drawn into complex relation with other clusters in the deep well of Coleridge's memory, and which then coalesced and issued forth as poems. If there was nothing "haphazard or fortuitous" in the way the images returned to the surface, that may mean (1) that Coleridge could not produce what he did not have, that he was limited in his creation by what he had read or otherwise experienced, or (2) that having received certain clusters of associations, he was bound to return them in just the way he did, and that the value of the poem may be described in terms of the experiences on which he had to draw. The latter pair of propositions (a sort of Hartleyan associationism which Coleridge himself repudiated in the Biographia) may not be assented to. There were certainly other combinations, other poems, worse or better, that might have been written by men who had read Bartram and Purchas and Bruce and Milton. And this will be true no matter how many times we are able to add to the brilliant complex of Coleridge's reading. In certain flourishes (such as the sentence we have quoted) and in chapter headings like "The Shaping Spirit," "The Magical Synthesis," "Imagination 11 Creatrix," it may be that Professor Lowes pretends to say more about the actual poems than he does. There is a certain deceptive variation in these fancy chapter titles; one expects to pass on to a new stage in the argument, and one finds-more and more sources, more and more about "the streamy nature of association ."8 "Wohin der Weg?" quotes Professor Lowes for the motto of his book. "Kein Weg! Ins Unbetretene." Precisely because the way is unbetreten, we should say, it leads away from the poem. Bartram's Travels contains a good deal of the history of certain words and of certain romantic Floridian conceptions that appear in "Kubla Khan." And a good deal of that history has passed and was then passing into the very stuff of our language. Perhaps a person who has read Bartrarn appreciates the poem more than one who has not. Or, by looking up the vocabulary of "Kubla Khan" in the Oxford English Dictionary, or by reading some of the other books there quoted, a person may know the poem better. But it would seem to pertain little to the poem to know that Coleridge had read Bartram. There is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For all the objects of our manifold experience, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context-or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about. It is probable that there is nothing in Professor Lowes' vast book which could detract from anyone's appreciation of either The Ancient Mariner or "Kubla Khan." We next present a case where preoccupation with evidence of type (3) has gone so far as to distort a critic's view of a poem (yet a case not so obvious as those that abound in our critical journals). In a well known poem by John Donne appears this quatrain: Moving of th'earth brings harmes and feares, Men reckon what it did and meant, But trepidation of the spheares,

Though greater farre, is innocent. 12

A recent critic in an elaborate treatment of Donne's learning has written of this quatrain as follows: He touches the emotional pulse of the situation by a skillful allusion to the new and the old astronomy.... Of the new astronomy, the ,'moving of the earth" is the most radical principle; of the old, the "trepidation of the spheres" is the motion of the greatest complexity. ... The poet must exhort his love to quietness and calm upon his departure; and for this purpose the figure based upon the latter motion (trepidation), long absorbed into the traditional astronomy, fittingly suggests the tension of the moment without arousing the harmes and feares" implicit in the figure of the moving earth. The argument is plausible and rests on a well substantiated thesis that Donne was deeply interested in the new astronomy and its repercussions in the theological realm. In various works Donne shows his familiarity with Kepler's De Stella Nova, with Galileo's Siderius Nuncius, with William Gilbert's De Magnete, and with Clavius' commentary on the De Sphaera of Sacrobosco. He refers to the new science in his Sermon at Paul's Cross and in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer. In The First Anniversary he says the "new philosophy calls all in doubt.' In the Elegy on Prince Henry he says that the "least moving of the center" makes "the world to shake." It is difficult to answer argument like this, and impossible to answer it with evidence of like nature. There is no reason why Donne might not have written a stanza in which the two kinds of celestial motion stood for two sorts of emotion at parting. And if we become full of astronomical ideas and see Donne only against the background of the new science, we may believe that he did. But the text itself remains to be dealt with, the analyzable vehicle of a complicated metaphor. And one may observe: (1) that the movement of the earth according to the Copernican theory is a celestial motion, smooth and regular, and while it might cause religious or philosophic fears, it could not be associated with the crudity and earthiness of the kind of commotion which the speaker in the poem wishes to discourage; (2) that there is another moving of the earth, an earthquake, which has just these qualities and is to be associated 13 with the tear-floods and sigh-tempests of the second stanza of the poem; (3) that "trepidation" is an appropriate opposite of earthquake, because each is a shaking or vibratory motion; and "trepidation of the spheres" is "greater far" than an earthquake, but not much greater (if two such motions can be compared as to greatness) than the annual motion of the earth; (4) that reckoning what it "did and meant" shows that the event has passed, like an earthquake, not like the incessant celestial movement of the earth. Perhaps a knowledge of Donne's interest in the new science may add another shade of meaning, an overtone to the stanza in question, though to say even this runs against the words. To make the geocentric and heliocentric antithesis the core of the metaphor is to disregard the English language, to prefer private evidence to public, external to internal. V

If the distinction between kinds of evidence has implications for the historical critic, it has them no less for the contemporary poet and his critic. Or, since every rule for a poet is but another side of a judgment by a critic, and since the past is the realm of the scholar and critic, and the future and present that of the poet and the critical leaders of taste, we may say that the problems arising in literary scholarship from the intentional fallacy are matched by others which arise in the world of progressive experiment. The question of "allusiveness," for example, as acutely posed by the poetry of Eliot, is certainly one where a false judgment is likely to involve the intentional fallacy. The frequency and depth of literary allusion in the poetry of Eliot and others has driven so many in pursuit of full meanings to the Golden Bough and the Elizabethan drama that it has become a kind of commonplace to suppose that we do not know what a poet means unless we have traced him in his reading-a supposition redolent with intentional implications. The stand taken by F. 0. Matthiessen is a sound one and partially forestalls the difficulty. 14

If one reads these lines with an attentive ear and is sensitive to their sudden shifts in movement, the contrast between the actual Thames and the idealized vision of it during an age before it flowed through a megalopolis is sharply conveyed by that movement itself, whether or not one recognizes the refrain to be from Spenser. Eliot's allusions work when we know them-and to a great extent even when we do not know them, through their suggestive power. But sometimes we find allusions supported by notes, and it is a nice question whether the notes function more as guides to send us where we may be educated, or more as indications in themselves about the character of the allusions. "Nearly everything of importance ... that is apposite to an appreciation of 'The Waste Land,"' writes Matthiessen of Miss Weston's book; "has been incorporated into the structure of the poem itself, or into Eliot's Notes." And with such an admission it may begin to appear that it would not much matter if Eliot invented his sources (as Sir Walter Scott invented chapter epigraphs from 11 old plays" and "anonymous" authors, or as Coleridge wrote marginal glosses for The Ancient Mariner). Allusions to Dante, Webster, Marvell, or Baudelaire doubtless gain something because these writers existed, but it is doubtful whether the same can be said for an allusion to an obscure Elizabethan: The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. "Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees:" says Eliot, When of a sudden, listening, you shall hear, A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring Actaeon to Diana in the spring, Mere all shall see her naked skin. The irony is completed by the quotation itself; had Eliot, as is quite conceivable, composed these lines to furnish his own background, there would be no loss of validity. The conviction may grow as one reads Eliot's next note: "I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was

15 reported to me from Sydney, Australia." The important word in this note-on Mrs. Porter and her daughter who washed their feet in soda water-is "ballad." And if one should feel from the lines themselves their "ballad" quality, there would be little need for the note. Ultimately, the inquiry must focus on the integrity of such notes as parts of the poem, for where they constitute special information about the meaning of phrases in the poem, they ought to be subject to the same scrutiny as any of the other words in which it is written. Matthiessen believes the notes were the price Eliot "had to pay in order to avoid what he would have considered muffling the energy of his poem by extended connecting links in the text itself." But it may be questioned whether the notes and the need for them are not equally muffling. F. W. Bateson has plausibly argued that Tennyson's "The Sailor Boy" would be better if half the stanzas were omitted, and the best versions of ballads like "Sir Patrick Spens" owe their power to the very audacity with which the minstrel has taken for granted the story upon which he comments. What then if a poet finds he cannot take so much for granted in a more recondite context and rather than write informatively, supplies notes? It can be said in favor of this plan that at least the notes do not pretend to be dramatic, as they would if written in verse. On the other hand, the notes may look like unassimilated material lying loose beside the poem, necessary for the meaning of the verbal symbol, but not integrated, so that the symbol stands incomplete. We mean to suggest by the above analysis that whereas notes tend to seem to justify themselves as external indexes to the author's intention, yet they ought to be judged like any other parts of a composition (verbal arrangement special to a particular context), and when so judged their reality as parts of the poem, or their imaginative integration with the rest of the poem, may come into question. Mathiessen, for instance, sees that Eliot's titles for poems and his epigraphs are informative apparatus, like the notes. But while he is worried by some of the notes and thinks that Eliot "appears to be mocking himself for writing the note at the same time that he wants to convey something by it," Matthiessen believes that the "device" of epigraphs "is not at all open to the objection of not being sufficiently structural." "The intention," he says, "is to enable the poet to secure a condensed expression in the poem itself ... .. In each case the epigraph is designed to form an integral part of the effect of the poem." And Eliot himself, in his notes, has justified his poetic practice in terms of intention. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V.... The man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself. And perhaps he is to be taken more seriously here, when off guard in a note, than when in his Norton Lectures he comments on the difficulty of saying what a poem means and adds playfully that he thinks of prefixing to a second edition of Ash Wednesday some lines from Don Juan: I don't pretend that I quite understand My own meaning when I would be very fine; But the fact is that I have nothing planned Unless it were to be a moment merry.

If Eliot and other contemporary poets have any characteristic fault, it may be in planning too much. Allusiveness in poetry is one of several critical issues by which we have illustrated the more abstract issue of intentionalism, but it may be for today the most important illustration. As a poetic practice allusiveness would appear to be in some recent poems an extreme corollary of the romantic intentionalist assumption, and as a critical issue it challenges and brings to light in a special way the basic premise of intentionalism. The following instance from the poetry of Eliot may serve to epitomize the practical implications of what we have been saying. In Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," toward the end, occurs the line: "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each," and this bears a certain resemblance to a line in a Song by John Donne, "Teach me to heare Mermaides singing," so that for the reader acquainted to a certain degree with Donne's poetry, the critical question arises: Is Eliot's line an allusion to Donne's? Is Prufrock thinking about Donne? Is Eliot thinking about Donne? We suggest that there are two radically different ways of looking for an answer to this question. There is (1) the way of poetic analysis and exegesis, which inquires whether it makes any sense if Eliot-Prufrock is thinking about Donne. In an earlier part of the poem, when Prufrock asks, "Would it have been worth while, . . . To have squeezed the universe into a ball," his words take half their sadness and irony from certain energetic and passionate lines of Marvel "To His Coy Mistress." But the exegetical inquirer may wonder whether mermaids considered as "strange sights" (to hear them is in Donne's poem analogous to getting with child a mandrake root) have much to do with Prufrock's mermaids, which seem to be symbols of romance and dynamism, and which incidentally have literary authentication, if they need it, in a line of a sonnet by Gerard de Nerval. This method of inquiry may lead to the conclusion that the given resemblance between Eliot and Donne is without significance and is better not thought of, or the method may have the disadvantage of providing no certain conclusion. Nevertheless, we submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake: (2) the way of biographical or genetic inquiry, in which, taking advantage of the fact that Eliot is still alive, and in the spirit of a man who would settle a bet, the critic writes to Eliot and asks what he meant, or if he had Donne in mind We shall not here weigh the probabilities-whether Eliot would answer that he meant nothing at all, had nothing at all in mind -a sufficiently good answer to such a question-or in an unguarded moment might furnish a clear and, within its limit, irrefutable answer. Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem "Prufrock"; it would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle.