Social Discourse Analysis: Outlines of a Research Project1

by Marc Angenot

Before getting into a discussion on the present state of affairs in literary history and
sociocriticism, and suggesting a few ideas about what is to be done (in my opinion) today in
literary studies, I shall describe the problematics of a research project which does not deal with
literary studies as such, but rather immerse, as it were, literary production into the whole of
social discourse. For the last few years,2 I have been working within a heuristic paradigm where
the notions of intertextuality and interdiscursiveness contribute to the elaboration of a broad
theory of social discourse. This project is based on a number of ideas and notions coming from
different horizons, and the reader will recognize a number of intellectual debts I owe to Antonio
Gramsci, Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Raymond Williams, and Michel Foucault as well as to thinkers
somewhat less known to English-speaking audiences such as the Argentinian-born semiotician
Luis Prieto, the novelist, philosopher, and historian of Fascism, Jean-Pierre Faye, the most
prominent French figure in cultural sociology today, Pierre Bourdieu, whose major work,
Distinction, has just been translated,3 and many others. In order to get into some issues of
sociocriticism, I need therefore to expose the general framework of this research into social
discourse, restricting myself to a display of general assumptions and hypotheses.
This research project, entitled “Eighteen eighty-nine: A State of Social Discourse,” is
based on the analysis of an extensive sampling of the whole of printed materials produced in
French in one year 1889, dealing therefore with a synchronic cut encompassing not only books
and booklets but also newspapers, periodicals, posters and all kinds of pamphlets, leaflets and
other ephemerals. To give an idea of the size of that sampling, let me say that it encompasses
some 1,200 books and booklets (comprising for instance some 250 works of fiction, from dime-
novels to avant-garde texts), 150 daily newspapers with sounding on key-dates, and some 400
other periodicals, from the upper-class “literary and political” journals to Christian weeklies for
rural classes. My point is to try to immerse discursive fields that are traditionally investigated
separately, -- such as literature, or philosophy, or scientific writings -- within the totality of what
is written, printed and disseminated in a given society, from these cross-road spaces of
journalism, public opinion, and publicist works, up to the ethereal forms of aesthetic research, of
philosophical speculation, and going down to the bottoms of pornography, of cabaret tunes, of
burlesque monologues and jokes, without omitting those apparently dissident productions of
marginal groups, spiritualists, adepts of the Religion of Positivism, nor the counter-discourses of
Socialism, Anarchism or (the word `feminism’ is not yet coined in French) the Movement for
Women’s Emancipation. The reader will realize that such an endeavor is not simply aimed at
producing an analytical description, sector by sector of ideologies, themes, and genres that
prevailed at the end of the 19th century (although such a description might already have some
sort of historical interest). My approach implies the building of a theoretical paradigm, a
paradigm that the analysis and interpretation of the material under scrutiny are supposed to both
illustrate and justify.

What do I mean by Social Discourse?

Everything that is said or written in a given state of society, everything that is printed, or
talked about and represented today through electronic media. Everything that narrates or argues,
if one contends that narration and argumentation are the two basic kinds of discursiveness. Social
discourse cannot be approached as this empirical “everything,” but rather as a constructed object,
that is, the extrapolation of those discursive rules and topics that underlie the endless rumor of
social discourses without ever being themselves objectified. These underlying rules (about which
I shall say more later) comprise a thematic repertory, an implicit cognitive system (or perhaps
several cognitive systems in competition), and a regulated topology, a division of labor in the
discursive realm. These are the basic components of what engenders the sayable, the writable,
institutionalized discourses of all kinds, the discursive acceptability at a given historical moment
in a given society. My objective is to try and connect the literary, scientific, philosophical,
political fields, and so forth, and without neglecting stakes, constraints and traditions of these
individual fields to extrapolate transdiscursive rules, to discover vectors of exchange, to set up a
global topology of the prevailing sayable, accounting therefore for my using “Social Discourse”
in the singular, and not social discourses as a simple coexistence and juxtaposition of genres,
disciplines, and local cognitive strategies.
This approach may not seem that different from what everybody has been doing, for one
century or more, under different name-tags, such as: History of Ideas, “Wissensoziologie,”
Cultural Studies, “Kritische Theorie,” epistemology, etc. This concept of social discourse may
also appear to be nothing but a belated substitute of what Marxists have identified alternatively
as “Culture” or “Ideology” (in the sense of such expressions as `Bourgeois ideology’), and that it
is engaging Michel Foucault’s episteme, Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony, etc. This is, in a way,
true, and even obvious, I am trying to get into this basic holistic approach with a different
attitude and with relatively new conceptual tools, thereby attempting to get rid of a number of
uncritical presuppositions, mechanistic analyses, elitist biases, and conventional blindspots that
jam this heterogeneous field of research.
When we talk about “Bourgeois ideology” (at the end of the past century, let us say) we
seem to imply that we know what we are talking about, when we are in fact just using a loose,
falsely synthetic notion, void of any clear content. Most of the time one implies that `Bourgeois
ideology’ was made out of a relatively static and structured set of ideas, images, notions that
would have been dominant or hegemonic at a given period of time. One may include in this so-
called bourgeois ideology a number of ingredients such as: Victorian attitudes towards sex; or
the rise of the “Public sphere” and mass journalism; Individualism; Social Darwinism conceived
of as a world view for the dominant classes; different forms of racism, jingoism coupled with
imperialist and colonial expansion; Positivism as the specific ideology of the scientific field....
All these intuitively synthetic notions do not seem to fit very clearly together. “Bourgeois
ideology” ends up looking like the famous joke about the four blind men that tried to describe an
elephant, one touching his trunk, the other one its legs, another one its tail, etc....
A culture, a social discourse is in fact never made out of a set of statically dominant
ideas, representations, systems of belief, “ideologies.” It is comprised of regulated antagonisms
between conflicting images, concepts, cognitive discrepancies, and incompatibilities that are still
relatively stabilized without ever reaching a state of equilibrium. Social discourse is made out of
a set of idéologèmes in tension with each other, of “sociograms” (Claude Duchet) thematizing on
divergent vectors and conflicting social representations. It is through and beyond these tensions,
conflicts, and compartmentalizations, beyond the cacophonic rumor of social languages, that
something like a hegemony will be discovered producing precedents and arbitrations between
conflicting discourses, concealing topical axioms and basic principles of social verisimilitude,
universal taboos and censorship that mark the boundaries of the “thinkable.” One should not
dissociate from this hegemony the normative imposition of the legitimate language, which is
always saturated with tropes and idioms, phraseologies and bombastic structures of feeling. It
should perhaps be added that so-called ideologies never go in isolation even if the historian tends
to isolate them (i.e. anticlerical id., anti-Semitic id., protofascism, republicanism and so forth) for
the purpose of analysis. Within this broader compendium, one of the functions of literature is to
provide pairings, linkages, couplings of idéologèmes. For instance in late 19th-C. Europe, sets of
semi-concealed images of homosexuality were coupled with literary Orientalism in the works of
Oscar Wilde, Pierre Loti, or the younger Gide, to name but a few. But in more general terms, it
may be contended that “ideological sex,” for instance, is never thematized alone, in journalism or
in literature, it is always present coupled with other semi-repressed notions or images.

Methodological aspects

A research project dealing with SD as a whole cannot but be called inter-disciplinary, in

the most pregnant sense of this word. It aims at decompartmentalizing and integrating all sorts of
analytical procedures and traditions developed to account for different sectors of discourses, such
as: press “content analysis” and political “discourse analysis;” pragmatics and the theory of
natural logic; presupposition; literary semiotics; narratology; rhetoric; epistemology; the
sociology of knowledge; hermeneutics; cultural studies; “archeology of knowledge” à la
Foucault; and so forth. I do not claim to master all these traditions and conceptual tools. I am
even ready to admit that the kind of endeavor I am describing is closer methodologically
speaking to a “bricolage” or a “tinkering” (Lévi-Strauss), than to any kind of consistent and
scientifically validated body of concepts. In some cases, like this one, any requirement for
unmitigated scientificity conceals a kind of intellectual submissiveness and cowardice. Rigorous,
computerized discourse analysis based on a selection of discrete lexicological or morphological
units certainly gives a stronger sense of rigor and verifiability, but, unfortunately, this only leads
to the discovery of tautologically obvious rephrasings. A holistic description and interpretation
of the whole mesh of social discourses is a more risky and hazardous endeavor because you have
to interpret, to relate seemingly heterogeneous phenomena, to determine what you will deem
meaningful and to what degree it is so. You do that at your own risk and you cannot expect to
cover your choices and proceedings with any all-inclusive insurance of scientificity. You have to
develop a kind of systematic “bulimia” in front of your gigantic sampling and resort to any
reasonable means to try and make sense of it all.

Ideology = Social Discourse

Within the perspective of SD analysis, I could not think any longer of opposing “science”
or “literature” to its supposedly mystifying counterpart that would be termed “ideology.”
Ideology is everywhere. All language is ideological and, to paraphrase Bakhtin’s ideas developed
in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, the realm of ideology coincides with that of signs; they are
mutually corresponding. All discourses and languages are ideological, which means that
whatever may be registered and identified in them bears the marks of ways of knowing and
representing the known world that are neither a matter of course, nor necessarily universal, but
that conceal specific social values, express more or less indirectly social interests, and occupy a
given position in the economy of discourses of a given time. Whatever is said and communicated
in a given society functions on a cumulated capital of codes, models, and pre-constructed
formulas. In any society, the body of discourses engenders a sum total of the sayable beyond
which one cannot catch, if not anachronistically, the “not yet said.”
 There is no reason to believe that slogans such as « La France aux Français »  or « Place
au prolétariat conscient et organisé » are more ideological than « La Marquise sortit à cinq
heures... » or « Le vent tourbillonnant qui rabat les volets/Là-bas tord la forêt comme une
chevelure.” However these utterances are formally, culturally, and socially quite different, they
do not emanate from the same social field, they do not appeal to the same addressee, they do not
irradiate the same kind of social magic. Still, their sociality cannot usefully get subsumed under
the catchword “ideology.”

“In eo movemur et sumus”: Hegemony

At any given moment, in any given society, the social discourse’s fundamental role is to serve as
the compulsory medium of communication, intelligibility, and rationality. All of the prescribed
topics of social interaction are formulated and diffused in the social discourse: it produces beliefs
and carries potent charms; it legitimates and publicizes certain views, tastes, opinions, and
themes while repressing others into the chimerical or the extravagant; it mediates between
sociolects; and it homogenizes the “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin) of class societies. In the SD you
find in coexistence all the soft forms of social domination of classes, sexes, privileges, and
statutory powers.
Even if canonic discourses are differentiated by a division of labor, their thematic,
rhetorical, social efficacy and status is not simply made out of a juxtaposition of autonomous
semiotic systems, evolving out of their own logic or under the influence of purely local aims and
stakes. This is why I speak of a generalized inter-discursiveness, described variously as the
Zeitgeist (for the traditional history of ideas), the “dominant ideology” (for mechanistic versions
of historical materialism), the cultural hegemony, the transdiscursive epistemé, the dominant
(emerging and recessive) “structures of feeling,” that is, any global concept that pretends to
account for a moment of symbolic production as displaying some sort of “organic unity” or at
least regulated and co-intelligible antagonisms. It should be stressed that this attempt at
extrapolating the prevailing elements of the omnipresent and omnipotent hegemony does not
prevent the researcher from noticing therein a range of contradictions, dysfunctions, local
imbalances, surreptitious changes in polarization and supremacies, and gaps that homeostatic
forces continuously try to seal off.

What is to be found in a discursive hegemony?

1. A set of topoi (in the sense of Aristotle), a number of basic propositions, irreducible
idéologèmes of verisimilitude and credibility, repressed to such a concealed level of
presupposition as to give full vent to ideological antagonisms, debates, disagreements and
polemics which are made possible by a host of implicit, commonly-shared axioms. For instance,
during the Dreyfus affair, one may have thought that the Dreyfusards and Anti-Drefusards had
nothing in common, whereas in order to disagree malignantly on “everything” they needed to
share one basic presupposition: One should not betray one’s motherland. At the beginning of the
present century, a number of defeatists and radical internationalists on the extreme left of
socialism started saying that the Proletarian has no “home country,” patriotism is a bad joke, etc.
These revolutionaries did not assume any longer the concealed topos, without which there would
not have been any “Dreyfus affair.”
2. At any moment, and despite of different ideologies in competition, there exists a
diffuse thematic paradigm that may undergo innumerable avatars but nevertheless provides the
basic features of a dominant world-view. Such a thematic paradigm is not necessarily embodied
in a specific philosophy or doctrine of the time; it may be more elusive, existing both
everywhere, and nowhere. Fashionable ideologies of the moment provide successive versions or
variants of this period; in fin de siècle France for example, obsessed with decadence and
degeneration, harassed and tormented by multiple anxieties, there exists the thematic domination
of something that I call “the Paradigm of Deterritorialization,” which is a paradigm that more or
less functions as an endless series of oppositions between isotopes whose terms are correlated in
the following way:

The Prince’s Body -------parliamentarism

Race--------------------degeneration
Burial------------------cremation
Rooted peasant----------uprooted urban worker
Prosody-----------------Free verse
Good-stock Frenchman----Wandering Jew
Marriage----------------celibacy, prostitution
Natural food------------ersätze, adulterated foods
Butter------------------Margarine etc.

3. Rather than identifying themes and topical derivations, what I am now looking for is a
dominant cognitive structure that may be in competition with other cognitive paradigms. This is
the kind of problem that has been dealt with by Tim Reiss in his Discourse of Modernism4 (with
his concept of analytico-referential truth and its emergence during the classical age), Joseph
Gabel5 (applying to modern bureaucratic societies his concept of “restricted rationality” and
“schizophrenia”) and Jürgen Habermas (with his notion of non-critical “instrumental reason” in
The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason & the Rationalization of Society 6). I was also led
to elaborate a set of hypotheses about the dominant gnoseology of the late 19th century, which
I’m tempted to define as the “generalized novelistic mode.” I am not thereby suggesting that the
journalist, the scientist, the attorney-general in his indictments imitate the novelist, but that the
high genre of literary fiction was simply a specific avatar of a more general bourgeois
gnoseology. This gnoseology is built on narrative sequences regulated by implicit maxims of
verisimilitude, deprived of over-determination, where the reading operates generalizing
inductions that are teleologically validated in the narrative. The reader projects on the
“ideological screen” the original codes which are still never objectified in the narrative itself.
This kind of narrative cognition actualizes two major ideological constructs: that of a certain
conventional “realism,” and that of an iconization of the socius amounting to produce a cast of
“typical” characters. Against Lukàcs aesthetics, I would argue that the “typical,” as a cognitive
means, represents a rather poor and non-critical degree of cognition against which the emerging
social sciences (E. Durkheim) will have to conquer more estranged and less commonsensical
ways of analyzing the social, i.e. they will have to “depersonalize” for instance these semi-
expressive and semi-abstracted entities that social types are.
I am not simply saying that the classical novel was a bourgeois genre, but rather that this
“romanesque” and its typical-inductive ways of knowing that do not allow for any critical
transcendence was the basic gnoseology of bourgeois SD in general. Whenever one reads a case
study in a medical journal, or an indictment form the prosecution, it tends to become a “realistic”
narrative, with its presuppositional verisimilitude and its construction of “types”: the cagey
peasant, the degenerate young man of good family, etc.
4. Discursive phobias. In any society certain beings and certain groups are rejected and
pointed at with disgust and distrust. There are common stereotypical ways to deal with these
excluded entities. Racism, jingoism, xenophobia, sexism, and above all this unnamed
discrimination, i.e. the hatred and disgust for the dominated, add up to build a synergic
compound of kindred ideologies. In late 19th-C. doxa, what they say about peasants, negroes,
women, alcoholics, criminals, and other savages has lots of features and cognitive strategies in
common.
5. The Literary Language. Hegemony cannot be dissociated from the imposition of the
canonic forms of high language. This dominant language is not to be reduced to a set of abstract
rules and norms. It comprises ceremonial knowledge, idioms, formal phraseologies, and elegant
tropes that legitimate “literary” language and “unify and centralize the literary ideological way of
thinking.” (Bakhtin).
6. Another aspect of hegemony is a negative counterpart of the first five: what we
perceive as universal taboos and censorships that mark out the limits of the sayable and the
thinkable. Discursive hegemony does not only provide canonic forms of expression and
compelling themes; it also represses certain “things” into the unthinkable, the absurd, the
chimerical.
If you work within a retroactive position of 90 years or so (three generations), you are
immediately struck by the fact that a number of contentions, of ideas that are today banal or at
least probable if not evident to all, were at the time literally unthinkable for even the most
“advanced” minds. Faced with certain problems, our immediate ancestors seem to display a
collective blindness, wrapping themselves in worn-out sophisms in a way that strikes us as
ridiculous, a sentiment that should be criticized, since it provides us an undue and naïve sense of
superiority. How is it that the strongest minds of the last century were so blind, unable to push
any reasoning to what seems to us its unavoidable logical conclusions? One should keep in mind
that if it is quite easy to point at the “limits of consciousness” of our immediate ancestors, it is
not so easy for us to estrange ourselves from our present hegemony, to examine with a sober
glance the inconsistencies of Jacques Derrida’s aestheticized nihilism, the neoliberalism of
political demagogueries, or the blindspots and the return of the ideological repressed in certain
feminisms or radical politics.

Division of Labor, discursive topology.

Up to now, I have been talking of transdiscursive tendencies, of unifying factors. Now let
me take the opposite point of view by summarily examining the allotment of roles on the
discursive stage and the division of discursive labor. One of those factors of differentiation that
was institutionalized during the 19th C. is the emergence of three discursive ghettoes determined
by their target addressees: 1) the production for children and teenagers that is getting
autonomized after the mid-century. 2) “Literature” for the urban plebes, form the popular novel
to café-concert tunes. 3) Literature for the ladies, from fashion magazines to sentimental
romances. These discursive ghettoes are but one aspect of the new division of labor. One should
obviously mention the galloping expansion of novel forms of journalism, the sphere of public
opinion and current news, the emergence or secession of new scientific disciplines: criminology,
experimental psychology, hypnotherapy etc.
 This division of discursive labor may also be approached in the logic of market and
commodities. Discourses circulate, their value is regulated by supply and demand, they are
marketed and exchanged. All discursive topologies are subject to a specific economy with its
market engineering, supply and demand, planned obsolescence of ideological goods, inventories
and clearance sales. A whole new economy with its fashions, infatuations, inflations and crashes,
that conflicts with the preservation principle and the need to control the limits and outskirts of
the thinkable. Hence the frequency of that classical compromise: the “foreseeable newness,” or
the art of making new out of the old.

Not only Texts

To study SD requires taking into consideration not only texts (or semiotic artifacts) but
also the aptitudes and talents, tastes and interests towards certain discursive complexes, i.e. the
audiences created by specific discursive types, such as the sentimental novel, or the highly
sophisticated chronicles of the Revue des deux Mondes, anticlerical or anti-Semitic propaganda,
broad jokes and smutty stories, or the ethereal and abstruse prose of symbolist novels.
By virtue of its very aims and designs, SD analysis rejects offhand any immanent
approach to `texts’ and therefore gets rid of the whole formalistic terrorism. We cannot deal with
texts and genres alone, not even with their sole intertextual genesis, one has to try and perceive
their acceptability, their efficiency, their charms, and how textual objects select their chosen
addressees. Such a critique therefore encompasses the analysis of individual inclinations and
propensities towards such and such genre, theme, doctrine, or slogan. That is: the aptitudes to
produce certain discourses and the receptive tastes and discursive competence required to enjoy
them, were they Mallarmé or Zola, anti-Semitic pamphlets or republican propaganda....
One has here to theoretically account for the basic intuition of any researcher who
operates within a historical retrospection. The literal meaning of the texts under scrutiny does not
escape her/him, but their charms have curiously evaporated: newspaper jokes no longer make
you laugh, the grand pathetic scenes of successful dramas leave you cold, the high declamations
of thinkers and doctrinaires seem sophistic and specious rather than persuasive. You can still
perceive the argumentative structure, but you aren’t moved or convinced. Passages of novels
which were supposed to give an impression of strong realism now disclose their ideological
texture, their tricks and expedients. In other words, one or two generations later, the SD as a
whole no longer works. Its doxological, aesthetic, or ethical efficiencies are by and large
dissipated, it has become a flat liquor and a stale nutriment. Today’s reader of 1889 newspapers
and books reacts like a bad-tempered mind that is no longer moved by what is pathetic, no longer
tickled or excited by what was frisky and libertine, no longer even amused by what, ninety years
ago, was sending whole audiences into stitches. One sees very well that it is not in the texts as
such that such a strange loss of communicative effectiveness may be explained.

The Social Production of Individuals

Another warning: When we talk about social discourse analysis, we don’t imply that one
should take into consideration only collective phenomena, anonymous themes and slogans,
common denominators, and public opinions. Social discourse includes the social production of
individualities, originality, competence, talent, specialization. SD is by and large the social
production of so-called “literary creation”. It is not only made out of collective fetishisms,
dominant doctrines but also of regulated forms of dissidence and “schismatic” opinions, and
distinguished structures of feeling. Not only the doxa but also those paradoxes that remain under
its influence. This amounts to saying that discourses are not made by writers and publicists but
rather that writers and publicists are shaped in their identity and role on the social stage by the
discourses they hold. Individuals with their talents, their dispositions are not to be seen as
contingent phenomena under a collective hegemony. They are specifically produced in the same
fashion that elsewhere SD produces platitudes, commonplaces, clichés and vulgarisms.
In any culture one finds leading parts and minor roles who together give this impression
of harmony found in the cast of a good play. Some are specialized in the production of a specific
ideological message; others occupy well remunerated positions as traditional “lines” of the
ideological stage: the great man and the wit, the arbiter elegantiarum, the grumpy benefactor, the
voice of wisdom, the pervert, the fashion contractor, the cicerone of programmed escapism, and
innumerable more modest tinkerers.

Present Stage of Research

Part of this “1889” project includes two monographs, one dealing with anti-Semitism (or
rather the global dispersion of utterances about Jews) entitled Ce que l’on dit des juifs en 1889,
and the other dealing with sex and social discourse entitled Le Cru et le Faisandé. 7 Why sex,
aside from what may seem exciting or frisky in this theme? Sex is par excellence something that
is being thematized at the same time in all sorts of discourses whose societal function, thematic
flow, and inner system are quite different. Between the axiogenic decrees of medical science and
the libertine complacency of the fashionable Parisian press obsessed by harlots, demi-mondaines,
and adultery, at first sight no unifying principle or common features seem to be identifiable. My
problem was to account for this diversity, to render it co-intelligible. You have the positivistic
medicalization of sex, with its therapies to cure the pederast, the masturbator, the adult pervert,
and the hysterical female. Criminology, i.e. the Italian school of Lombroso that invents the
notion of the “born prostitute,” an atavistic survival of the primitive female in a society evolving
towards progress. Newspapers are discovering the strategies of sensationalism and start using
sexual disorders and crimes as a means of providing stochastic shocks to the reader. In the
literary realm, sex is everywhere but is thematized in radically different settings, ranging from
two-penny pornography and “gauloiserie” to the supposedly innovative audacities of avant-garde
naturalism and modernism. Here again we are invited to scour a space of cultural distinction,
form the ineptitudes of trivial smut to the supposedly profound meditations on a society that is
going to the dogs, with its unquenched and hysterical modern female characters and its
degenerate fin-de-siècle perverts. This research has also led me to work on diverse
methodological issues including: notions of intertextuality and interdiscursiveness; the “Struggle
for Life” as a typical example of an idéologème with its migration through the sociodiscursive
network; the production of true narratives in journalism and other kinds of public discourses with
a case study of the Mayerling Affair (30 Jan, 1889) and its interpretations in France; an extensive
survey of a generic cluster deemed the sentimental romance; as well as thematic work on
patriotic fetishism, Jingoism, xenophobia, and the production of the canonic “literary” French
through the interplay of all discursive sectors.

Sociocriticism in France
 After these considerations on SD, let me now get into literary sociocriticism. The reader
will have understood that the logic of my present work is not to push literature to the foreground
and relegate social discourse onto a position of background rumor. My object is to deal first and
foremost with social discourse without having to defend or take as a point of departure any
preconceived idea about the function of literature or the essence of literariness. I believe that this
so-called “essence” is a sheer variable, determined by the structure of social discourse and
beyond it by power relations and the institutional structure of given societies. There is not much
in common between literature’s function and the nature of what remains of high literature in this
country and the part innovative fictional production may play in countries like Cuba, or Nigeria,
or Haiti today.
The word “sociocritique” was coined by Claude Duchet some 15 years ago, mainly to get
rid of “literary sociology,” and to distinguish a sociology of literature (which is a sector of
cultural sociology) from a textual criticism, a semiotics of literary production, axiomatically
conceived as social and historical in its methods and aims. What was at stake then was to
acknowledge and overcome a double blindness; first, the inability of structural semiotics and the
Formalist tradition to recognize “la socialité” (the social character of literature) and second, the
complementary inability of Marxist theories of literature (cf. Lukàcs) to cope with the material,
concrete character of linguistic signs and exchange. In that sense, the “sociocritics” were taking
up concerns and critiques that had been central to Tynianov in his famous essay “On Literary
Evolution” (1929), to Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle in their polemical work The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship (Leningrad: Priboj, 1928), and to Jan Mukarovskì (Studie
estetiky. Praha: Odeon, 1966). There are chances that neither Tynianov, nor Bakhtin, nor
Mukarovskì were known at all by any of these French critics in the early seventies and that they
were unknowingly taking up scholarly disputes that scan the history of literary studies in the
present century. There is a wide agreement among Francophone sociocritics about this basic
attitude, which is not simply to juxtapose formal description and “Marxist” interpretation, but to
work out a sociohistorical semiotics that accounts for both the production and reception of
literary texts, a critical semiotics that would recognize at once how literary judgments and values
are shaped by the “cultural arbitrariness” and the “market of symbolic goods” in non-egalitarian
societies while still trying to evaluate the (occasionally) critical function that literary texts may
fulfill.
French “sociocritiques” are a small scattered group of individuals who do not occupy a
dominant position in the Academe. A journal like Littérature, although eclectic, seems to provide
a tribune for some of them. Claude Duchet, Henri Mittérand, Jacques Leenhardt work in Paris.
Edmond Cros published Imprévue in Montpellier and became the editor of Sociocriticism at the
University of Pittsburgh PA. Pierre V. Zima whose theoretical work appeared half in German
and half in French, teaches at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Charles Grivel occupies a
chair of Romanistik in Mannheim, W. Germany. Jacques Dubois works at the University of
Liège in Belgium. They all entertain relatively close relations with people working elsewhere in
textual sociology, and the first four issues of Sociocriticism reflected this rather cosmopolitan or
indeed internationalist character of sociocritical research and discussion. On the other hand, I
don’t seem to find much exchange between “sociocritiques” and the British tradition of cultural
studies. Raymond Williams’ thinking has never been discussed in the francophone realm, and
works of the Birmingham group or of Media, Culture, and Society are probably unknown to
most in that realm. The picture here is more or less what is to be expected: some pioneering
research, a potentially significant international network of exchange, a common hostility against
neo-positivist and formalist fetishism, and also a certain entropy facing numerous theoretical and
methodological difficulties. Still enough to entertain reasons for hope and the will to persevere
and try to reach new horizons.

The Inscription of Social Discourse in Literary Texts

In this context I would like to take up here some remarks and theses Régine Robin and I
conveyed in our paper “L’Inscription du discours social” published in the first issue of
Sociocriticism (Vol. I, 1: 1985). They amplify a number of hypotheses formulated in the first part
of this paper.
Contrary to what was proposed in the old “literary sociology” which, from Lukàcs to
Goldmann, perpetually neglected or went round the text itself and the textual labor on language
and discourses, let me lay down the principle that literature only deals with textual referents, that
is, it refers or relates only to other discourses, even if the writer’s aim is to somehow lay hold of
the extra-textual and to know and represent one of the truths of this world. The reference that
texts make to practices and to the empirical world should be discussed, but only after we have
understood that such references operate through the mediation of preexisting languages and
discourses which know the world differently and even contradictorily. Hence the basic question
is to find how literature as a symbolic practice operates within a complex topology, from oral
exchange and conversation, up to major established, official discourses. The writer first of all
someone who listens, from the position (s)he occupies in society, to the immense disseminated
rumor of social discourse that comes to the ear of man-in-society as erratic fragments, images,
utterances still bearing traces of issues and debates they were engaged in, bearing the stamp of
migrations and changes they have undergone. These utterances that migrate in social exchange,
recurring in conversation, bill-posting, newspapers, official eloquence, books of different kinds,
are not only polysemic: they are also charm-carriers, carriers of societal efficacies, of maker’s
names, of ideological imprints, that build up a confused memory of the doxa.
In what comes to the writer’s ear, there are commonplaces, clichés, practical maxims that
mark out the realm of mentalities; there are also more extensive paradigms, public opinions,
disciplinary knowledge, political slogans, and, finally, large doctrinaire constructs, worldviews
and historiosophies. The writer does not apprehend these fragments, these bits and pieces of
enthymemes, of phraseologies, as closed monads, but as semi-available elements which offer
affinities -- some obvious, some others “strange,” -- with other fragments of social
representation. They are like the pieces of a gigantic puzzle whereby the specific features of one
discursive element suggest connections and analogies to another. The writer, at least the realistic
writer, is someone for whom the real, mediated by social discourse, offers itself as a scattered
puzzle; but like any puzzle, it does so with the guarantee that certain work, conjectures, and
manipulations will allow for the production of some kind of shape. Contrary to a commonplace
of naturalism, the writer is not primarily one that observes the world, but someone whose keen
ear discriminates better in the hubbub of discourses what deserves to be transcribed and worked
out.
The Ideologist endeavors to produce homogeneity, certainty, identity. He/She institutes
her/himself as an ideological subject through a tinkering of pre-built elements. Madame Bovary
has read in the convent gothic romances by Madame Cottin, Madame de Genlis, Ducray-
Duminil, and in these chlorotic medieval heroines she recognized herself, whereas Monsieur
Homais, the pharmacist of Yonville, complacently proclaims himself a Voltairian, a Rousseauist,
and enthusiast of Progress, a sworn enemy of clerical obscurantism. In both, some elements of
social discourse seem to have precipitated, and in this chemical precipitate they re-cognized
themselves. The Writer is one who forbids himself to use the enigmatic constructs found in
social discourse as a direct means to identify.
I therefore believe that literary texts (and others) should be approached and analyzed as
intertextual apparatuses which select, absorb, transform and re-diffuse certain images, maxims
and notions that migrate through the sociodiscursive network. In this respect, an “immanent” or
“formal” reading of a text is not only partial or misleading, it is simply illusory. Texts make
sense only within an intertextual network which they both evoke and antagonize. Against all
“positive” commonsense, a text is constituted and marked as much by what it excludes as by
what it includes. The discursive world that is excluded from the text cannot fail to be tacitly
reinscribed by the reader familiar with that world. If one tries now to deal with the literary field
globally, I would maintain once again that there is no point in approaching this cultural sector in
isolation as if it were a self-sufficient universe. Not only should we proceed through the whole
array of aesthetic distinction within that field, from the “narrower circuit” of avant-gardes to
middlebrow fiction, drama, and poetry, and down to so-called “popular” or mass paraliteratures;
but we should also seek the interdiscursive connections between the literary and the political,
scientific and journalistic discourses should be thoroughly investigated so that the literary
function will be identified in its historical relativity as a function of the whole cultural economy.
After all, literature is and has always been a very strange sociological phenomenon.
Universal and transhistorical as it may be, it is also somewhat a-functional. That is, it will never
become the dominant structure in a society, as religious discourse was for the Western Middle
Ages, or the juridical, legal was for the classical age. I am therefore trying to define literariness
by its negative function within the globality of SD. If literature is sometimes called upon to play
a normative societal role it is only insofar as it is subordinated to other institutions, contributing
to reinforce and legitimize the norms of good language, or vindicating the rights of the monarchy
and its ruling class. Still, throughout Modern times, literature has been a discourse without a
mandate, without a determined topic or object. Human paleontology produces systematically its
object: prehistoric man, but in its shadow literature is present which starts producing (at least
since the 1860’s) innumerable prehistoric romances that are both subordinated to the production
of knowledge and still providing (through fictionalization) a kind of ironical accompaniment. In
bourgeois societies, the literary function more or less corresponds to that of the court jester in the
Renaissance, one who at the foot of the throne blurts out a quip or a sally, ambiguously discloses
a few truths, scoffs at good manners, proprieties, and established prestige, parodies the languages
of power and mixes them up, brings out their inadequacies. The court jester takes advantage of
the forbearing tolerance of his Patron-Prince as long as he does not go too far. He keeps saying
“It ain’t necessarily so!” and they let him say it, because they know he is parasitic and
irresponsible, because his subversiveness paradoxically confirms the legitimate doctrines, the
decrees, and teachings, and because he remains subordinated to the Prince’s and his
doxographers’ word. Still, one day he may go too far...and end up encountering the headman’s
hatchet!
The reader will excuse the sketchy character of this text, which is meant to be more
suggestive than systematic. I don’t have the space to elaborate on these issues nor to illustrate
them. What I wanted to do was to offer a number of principles and suggest avenues of inquiry
that seem to me relevant to the development of sociocriticism.
The impossible “Literary” History

Literary history, which was codified at the end of the 19th century by G. Lanson in
France, is nothing but an epicycle or an avatar of the very ideology of the literary field which
throughout the century had been striving to gain autonomy and to see itself as autarkical and self-
sufficient. This claim for aesthetic self-sufficiency, this myth of the Immaculate Conception of
literature which goes from the symbolists to the pan-textualism of Tel Quel is, no doubt, the
proton pseudos, the basic lie of the literary institution. My aim is to get rid of any claim for the
radical autonomy of the literary text, and to immerse it where it belongs, that is in its very
discursive surroundings. In more general terms, I try to decompartmentalize all discourses in
order to recapture the concept of totality. A synchronic analysis like the one I just described is
obviously based on a different concept of synchronicity than that of structuralism or functionalist
linguistics. A historical synchrony is not made of a homeostatic system of functional units that
coexist in opposition to each other, it is a space of confrontation, of imbalances, and of
heterogeneity. Late 19th Century “ bourgeois ideology” may have been “individualistic,” but it
was also the moment when nationalist, racist and socialist ideologies emerged and took up their
modern aspect. The 1890’s may be the acme of scientific positivism with a host of agnostic
physicians who claim they never found “the soul under their scalpel”, but it is also, as any book
on “Dekadentismus” and symbolism will show, a moment when there is a sudden upsurge of
religiosity and spiritualism. So you have to try to account for the coexistence and overall
function of all these “themes” and ideological compounds that are interacting and that don’t
statically confront each other. My attitude, when dealing in this project with Anti-Semitism, was
basically the same; a history of Anti-Semitism which would essentially be a genealogy of its
doctrinaires from Toussenel and Tridon, to Drumont, Chirac etc. may look consistent and self-
explanatory since you will find that a number of the same idéologèmes are handed over from one
pamphleteer to another, each time being re-elaborated and re-orchestrated, as it were. Still, if you
immerse Anti-Semitic propaganda into its contemporaneous sociodiscursive network, you get a
very different picture which eliminates the blindspots engendered by the very artefactual
construct of the doctrinaire’s genealogy. What you immediately get are a number of hints about
the conditions of possibility, credibility, acceptability of Anti-Semitism, and its thematic
connections with other constructs. You start distinguishing, through your indiscriminate
sampling, vectors of dispersal, of dissemination of utterances “about Jews” within the logic of
semi-autonomous discursive fields, from the juvenile novel to the news-in-brief of dailies, from
the ultra-montane Catholic sector to the different socialist and anarchist “sects” and their
propaganda, from anthropology to medical science. Instead of confronting a cohort of somewhat
obsessional “specialists” of anti-Jewish hatred, you obviously get a quite different image of the
phenomena which ends up deconstructing the logic of doctrinaire anti-Semitism. The fragment is
misleading without the totality.
When you deal with a literary text with any degree of historical retroactivity, the first
thing you must be aware of is that you are dealing with a decontextualized object, a hieroglyphic
monument whose aesthetic charm may be due for a large part to its degree of strangeness. Zola’s
La Bête humaine (1889, obviously!) is for today’s reader such a monument: sufficiently
decontextualized as to leave behind its historical contemporaneity. This involved not only the so-
called “aesthetic pleasure” you experience but also a number of “ideological” vested interests
that fortunately have become for us a “dead letter.” By re-immersing Zola into its
“Gleichzeitigkeit” you discover that Jacques Lantier is an ideological brother of Jack the Ripper
(1888-89) interpreted through C. Lombroso’s theory of the “born criminal” and reinterpreted in
relation to a number of supposedly scientific constructs, on atavistic regressions, aberrations of
the genital instinct, theories of progress and devolution, etc., that were fashionable one century
ago. By simply rereading any literary text isolated from the cacophonic rumors of contemporary
social discourses you grant it all that it demands: to become a “pure” aesthetic entity. To parody
Mallarmé, literature is meant to “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.” If you suppress
the tribe’s language that the text more or less adroitly purified, purged or filtered, what remains
is a “Thing of beauty” at its optimal degree of faked autonomy, i.e. not too antiquated as to
require archeological efforts but still sufficiently disentangled from its ideological conditions of
genesis, no longer tied down to those discourses and themes it absorbed and recycled in order to
manifest itself as a “literary” object.

Editor’s notes
1
This text appeared as the first essay in the first issue of Discours social/Social Discourse, the journal that Marc and I
started at McGill University in 1988. The original essay was very discursive, akin to an oral presentation, and it bore the
traces of Marc’s wonderful but sometimes Gallic English. I have tried to streamline the text without taking away from its
substance or its charm by eliminating the highly personal tone and eliminating some of the rhetorical redundancies.
2
From the mid-80s until the early 90s, by which time most of the texts Angenot wrote on this subject had appeared,
including the 1200+ page book 1889: Un état du discours social.
3
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1987.
4
Tim Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism, Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1982.
5
Joseph Gabel, Ideologies and the Corruption of Thought, translation by Alan Sica, NY, Transaction Press, 1997.
6
Beacon Press, 1985.
7
Difficult to translate, but something like “The Crude and the Gamey.”