The Reality of Representation: Between Marx and Balzac

Petrey, Sandy

doi:10.1086/448450

Cited by 28 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Other admirers argue that this text anticipates later discourse-theoretical insights into the performativity of language, the discursive constitution of identities and interests, and their role in shaping the forms and terms of political struggle (Fairclough & Graham, 2002;Jessop, 2002;Petrey, 1988;Stallybrass, 1990).…”

Section: The Eighteenth Brumaire: Discourse and The Politicalmentioning

confidence: 96%

Language and critique: some anticipations of critical discourse studies in Marx

Jessop

Sum

2018

Critical Discourse Studies

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We examine Marx's critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and 'cultural political economy'. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labour, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (or misrepresents) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a 'poetry' of the future. We then consider the misleading 'basesuperstructure' metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx's work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy.

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Section: The Eighteenth Brumaire: Discourse and The Politicalmentioning

confidence: 96%

Language and critique: some anticipations of critical discourse studies in Marx

Jessop

Sum

2018

Critical Discourse Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…And for yet others, this text illustrates the great extent to which Marx anticipated subsequent discourse-theoretical insights into the performative nature of language, the discursive constitution of identities and interests, and their role in shaping the forms and terms of political struggle. For Marx interpreted politics in The Eighteenth Brumaire as formative rather than superstructural, performative rather than reflective (Petrey 1988;Stallybrass 1990).…”

Section: Bob Jessopmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Marx, too, stresses the theatricality of politics not only as metaphor but also as a self-conscious political practice on the part of political actors as they sought to persuade and impress their audience by adopting character masks and roles from the historical past and/or from a dramatic repertoire. And, on the other hand, Marx himself had a solid grounding in ancient and modern philosophies of literature and drama, their theory and history, and an immense range of what he and Engels described in the Communist Manifesto as 'world literature ' (see, in general, Prawer 1978; and, on The Eighteenth Brumaire in particular, Petrey 1988, Riquelme 1980, Rose 1978Stallybrass 1998;and White 1973). This is reflected in his passionate use of parody as a mode of emplotment to ridicule the two Bonapartes.…”

Section: The Political Stagementioning

confidence: 99%