Industry in Theory, Friday 22nd
March 2013,
4-5pm, Lipman 121
This session, led
by Sarah Shaw, final year Creative Writing PhD Student, will concentrate on
Pierre Macherey’s question about what is absent from the literary work in A Theory of Literary Production. In particular we will be examining Macherey’s
ideas in relation to critiques of industrialised agribusiness produced by
Vandana Shiva.
Pierre Macherey, speculating on what is marginal to the
literary work, ‘what it does not say….its relation to what it is not,’ asked,
‘In what relation to that which is other than itself is the work produced?’ He
postulated that ground from which the work emerges as ‘not a “natural” empirical
reality, but that intricate reality in which men [and women]—both writers and
readers—live, that reality which is their ideology’ (A Theory of Literary
Production, 1978 [1966] Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, pp154-5). Macherey’s
theories have been used to debate the vexed relationship between economic base
and ideological superstructure, and also the unconscious of a work. In relation
to the topic of industry in theory, I am interested in looking at the necessity
of food production to literary production, together with its absence in the
literary work.
I am writing a novel in which a fifteen-year-old girl is
diagnosed with leukaemia. Advice on preventing cancer includes avoidance of
harmful chemicals, for example pesticides used in agriculture. However,
whenever one of my characters starts to cook using organic ingredients or feel
the wind blowing across the North Sea from the direction of Chernobyl, the
narrative begins to sound like propaganda rather than engaging fiction. So I am
suggesting we read a couple of extracts from Vandana Shiva’s work that
contrasts industrialised agribusiness with small-scale sustainable food
production, and discuss how they relate to literature/fiction.
We will be mostly
focusing on the quotation used by Sarah in this description, which is taken
from page 154 of Macherey’s text. To
view an entire version of Macherey’s text please google ‘Pierre Macherey Theory
of Literary Production’ and open the PDF file provided by Routledge (this is
the first option on the google search).
We will be discussing
these ideas in relation to brief critiques of multinational corporations’
involvement in agribusiness by Vandana
Shiva, focusing particularly on two pieces: ‘Violent Economic “Reforms”, and
the Growing Violence against Women’ (Dec
2012) and ‘The Suicide Economy of Corporate Globalisation’ (April 2004).
This looks set to
be a very interesting and engaging session.
All welcome! Refreshments will be
provided and the discussion will continue in The Carriage afterwards.
We will look
forward to seeing you all then.
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