| Traditionally the authority of interpretive strategies has rested on an autonomous text or on an ideal rationality. However, the authority of what Stanley Fish calls interpretive communities rests on implicit political appeals, unstated ideological commitments. For example, the New Critics invoke neutral, independent forms, the authorial critics, disinterested truth, the reader-response critics, self-interested readers, and Derrideans, decentered, "empty" language. Unlike traditional Marxists, who seek the socio-economic import of literary criticism, neo-Marxists analyze the politics implicit in these established communities. Thus neo-Marxists argue that the New Critics neglect the conditions in which the artist produces and the critic receives a text, the authorial critics ignore the institutional contexts governing rationality and truth, the reader-response critics dismiss the institutional training and commitments of the reader, and the Derrideans set aside the historical contexts in which language exercizes political force.;A deconstructive Marxism can expose the political roots of literary authority consistently. Like the established neo-Marxisms, a deconstructive Marxism means to question the political import of established approaches and expose their role in reproducing and justifying social injustice. Moreover, a deconstructive approach questions the import of its own discourse and acknowledges its complicity with established approaches.;The neo-Marxists expose the politics of the established, apolitical approaches; at the same time, however, the neo-Marxists also duplicate the politics which they mean to expose. They accuse the New Critic of neglecting artistic conditions, but they neglect such conditions themselves. They object to the transcendent truth of the authorial critic, yet they preserve such ideals of truth. They criticize the reader-response critic for insufficient negativity even though their own criticism does not always express much negativity. While they condemn the "spineless" skepticism of the Derridean, they retain the interpretive techniques which the Derridean derives from that skepticism. They get some way but not the whole way beyond the established approaches. Their politics also remain apolitical. |
