문학, 사회, 사회적인 것

Literature, Society, and the Social

In literature today, society is increasingly invisible. Apart from the neo-liberal drive to dismantle nation-states and prioritize economic efficiency, the disappearance of society has something to do with the historical inability of literary theory to imagine 'the social.' Lukács, for instance, articulated persuasively the characteristics of the artistic reflection of social reality, but he was inept at dealing with the social relations of artistic subjects. Žižek try to remind us of the sociality of art and literature while redefining the social. For him, the social presents itself as the Real that structures subjectivity. This implies an aesthetics which defies both reflectionism and expression-ism. A consideration of the collective agency, however, seems fatally missing. Rancière offers a plausible alternative when he holds that literature is about redistributing the sensible and rebuilding a common world. The social, in his perspective, is not so much a structure as a permanent process of reaffirming the 'intelligence of anybody.' The essence of the sociality of literature lies in its function ("liaison-function," as Leavis called it) of attaining what may be called an in-between universality of intelligence, as opposed to an overarching, homogenizing universality. In literature, our Mitsein is revealed; through literature, a community emerges.