Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 4 Marxisms
Photo 4.2 Advertising as an example of the ‘problematic’.
buying a car increase both pollution and road congestion? The answer given, without
the question being asked, is that this car, as if by magic, neither pollutes nor contributes
to road congestion.
Pierre Macherey’s (1978) A Theory of Literary Production is undoubtedly the most
sustained attempt to apply the technique of the Althusserian symptomatic reading to
cultural texts. Although, as the book’s title implies, Macherey’s main focus is on literary
production, the approach developed in the book is of great interest to the student
of popular culture.
In his elaboration of Althusser’s method of symptomatic reading, he rejects what he
calls ‘the interpretative fallacy’: the view that a text has a single meaning which it is the
task of criticism to uncover. For him the text is not a puzzle that conceals a meaning;
it is a construction with a multiplicity of meanings. To ‘explain’ a text is to recognize
this. To do so it is necessary to break with the idea that a text is a harmonious unity,
spiralling forth from a moment of overwhelming intentionality. Against this, he claims
that the literary text is ‘decentred’; it is incomplete in itself. To say this does not mean
that something needs to be added in order to make it whole. His point is that all literary
texts are ‘decentred’ (not centred on an authorial intention) in the specific sense
that they consist of a confrontation between several discourses: explicit, implicit, present
and absent. The task of critical practice is not, therefore, the attempt to measure
and evaluate a text’s coherence, its harmonious totality, its aesthetic unity, but instead
to explain the disparities in the text that point to a conflict of meanings.