According to Bakhtin, the reason that literature is the most ideological of all ideological spheres may be discovered in the structure of genre. He criticizes the formalists for ending their theory with a consideration of genre; genre, he observes, should be the first topic of poetics. The importance of genre lies in its two major capacities: conceptualization and “finalization.” A genre’s conceptualization has both inward and outward focus: the artist does not merely represent reality; he or she must use existing (...) means of representation in tension with the subject at hand. This process is analogous to the dual nature of the utterance, its orientation simultaneously toward its past contexts and its present context. “A particular aspect of reality can only be understood in connection with the particular means of representing it” .Genre’s production of perception is not simply a matter of physical orientation; it is also a matter of ideology: “Every significant genre is a complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and finalization of reality” . According to Bakhtin, nonideological domains are “open work,” not subject to an ultimate closure; but one goal of works of art is precisely to offer closure, a “finalization” that accounts for their ideological power and their capacity to produce consciousness. In the particular finalization of genre, we see a continual tension between tradition and situation.25 As Terry Eagleton suggests in Criticism and Ideology, “A power-loom, for one thing, is not altered by its products…in the way that a literary convention is transformed by what it textually works.”26 Analogously, Bakhtin writes that “the goal of the artistic structure of every historical genre is to merge the distance of space and time with the contemporary by the force of all-penetrating social evaluation” . It is perhaps because of this purported goal that Bakhtin himself seemed to prefer the novel, which he viewed as a meta-genre incorporating at once all domains of ideology and all other literary genres. Finally, we must emphasize that Bakhtin’s model of genre rests upon his insistence that literary evolution is not the result of device reacting against device, as Viktor Shklovsky believed, but rather of ideological, and ultimately socioeconomic, changes. 25. For a discussion of the tension between genre and performance, and between tradition and situation, in folkloric performances, see Hymes, “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 88 : 345-69.26. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 73. Susan Stewart is associate professor of English at Temple University. She is the author of a book of poetry, Yellow Stars and Ice , and two books of literary theory, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature and On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the Collection. (shrink)

The pornography debate occupies a prominent site of apparent contradiction in contemporary culture: a site where the interests of cultural feminism merge with those of the far Right, where an underground enterprise becomes a major growth industry, and where forms of speculation turn alarmingly practical. Another more problematic confluence occurs as a result of this debate. That is, by juxtaposing the 1986 Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography and the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, we (...) will see how pornography and the public discourse on pornography share the same comparative logic. An examination of such a logic shows how the pleasures of comparison—its gestures toward control, limit, and transcendence—are always balanced by its failures, even tragedies: the realization of the situated nature of all measurement, juxtaposition, subordination, and hierarchization. Thus this essay is designed to both discuss and illustrate a series of issues implicit in pornography’s predicament: the impossibility of describing desire without generating desire; the impossibility of separating form and content within the process of sublimation; and, most important, the impossibility of constructing a metadiscourse on pornography once we recognize the interested nature of all discursive practices. We cannot transcend the pornography debate, for we are in it. But by writing through it, by examining its assumptions, we can learn a great deal about the problems of representing desire and the concomitant problems of a cultural desire for unmediated forms of representation. Susan Stewart, whose most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin’s Anti-linguistics” , is the author of two books of literary theory, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature and On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection , and two books of poetry, Yellow Stars and Ice and The Hive . She is finishing a book on “crimes of writing,” of which this essay is a part, and a study of the five senses. (shrink)