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Metzger's Predicament
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2011
Extract
Any discussion of Thomas Metzger's book, Escape from Predicament, must begin with an evaluation of its possible meanings, not exegetical arguments over his specific reading and selection of texts. Most exegeses are reduced to quibbling over the interpretation of texts and the decision to use certain writings over others. This is possible because of a mistaken belief that the whole—the thesis or argument—is reducible to its parts. Moreover, it is precisely because of a tacit agreement with the general argument that critics usually resort to the form of a commentary. But, it is important to note, the overall effect of such a mode is to confirm the study under examination in its broad outline. It is my intention to concentrate on some of the terms which made this book possible and gave it a specific orientation. Yet, in so doing, I should say at the outset that I will focus on three large areas of discussion: the construal of history and its function for the discourse on modernization; the problematik informing this construing; and the problem of reading texts.
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- Review Symposium: Thomas A. Metzger's Escape from Predicament
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- Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1980
References
1 I have relied on and learned much from Gérard Mairet's Le discours et I'historique(Paris: Bibliotheque Reperes.Mame, 1974).Google Scholar
2 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chi cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 260–61.Google Scholar
3 Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Press, 1972), pp. 8–9.Google Scholar
4 Mairet, pp. 35–61. Lévi-Strauss, Savage differing series in the interest of narrative conti-Mind, p. 260 also shows how histotians collapse nuity.
5 Foucault, p. 9.
6 Ibid., p. 12.
7 I should point out that Weber, unlike Parsons, believed that cultural values were still constrained by history. Metzger, as I show later, follows Parsons in this respect.
8 On later reflection, I find that this effort to reduce politics to psychology is really very much of a piece with the psychologizing and subjectivizing of contemporary American ideology.
9 The concept of overdetermination has a rather long history. It was used first, I believe, by Freud to explain the mechanism by which dream thoughts gain entry into the manifest dream content. Freud proposed the theory that “each element of a dream's content turns out to have been overdetermined-to have been represented in dream thoughts many times over.” “The elements of the dream are constructed out of the whole mass of dream thoughts and each of those elements is shown to have been determined many times over in relation to the dream thoughts.” Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Strachey, James (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 318.Google Scholar
I have used the concept in a slightly different way, suggested by Foucault, and by Louis Althusser in For Marx (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 89–128Google Scholar, to indicate multiple causes in the determination of a traumatizing event. See also n. 11.
10 Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), PP. 93–94.Google Scholar
11 Williams, Raymond, in Marxism and Literalure (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 83–89Google Scholar, has neatly summarized the complex problem of determinations as they operate in history. His conclusion, which I follow, is that determination, in practice, is the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures. “Determination of this whole kind—a complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures—is in the whole social process itself and nowhere else: not in an abstracted ‘mode of production’ nor in an abstracted ‘psychology.’ “Williams argues against any effort to isolate autonomous categories as means of controlling or predicting the historical outcome. Overdetermi—nation, in this context, is the means to avoid the isolation of autonomous structures or categories, “In its most positive form, “Williams writes, “that is, in its recognition of multiple forces, rather than isolated forces or modes or techniques of production, and its further recognition of these forces as structures, in particular historical situations, rather than elements of an ideal totality or, worse, merely adjacent—the concept of ‘over—determination’ is more useful than any other as a way of understanding historically lived situations and the authentic complexities of practice.” Williams goes on to specify that overdetermination is particularly useful for understanding “contradictions,” what I have called traumatizing events, since it calls attention to the relative unevenness of different practices and development, and to the effects of such unevenness when it is no longer possible to maintain neutrality among the varying elements and forces.