Doris Lessing

Posted on Nov 11, 2009 in Talks | 0 comments

In September 2009 I was invited to deliver a paper at the annual Workshops in Political Theory held at Manchester Metropolitan University. My paper explored the "inner-space fiction" of Doris Lessing through the conceptual framework of the philosophy of solidarity (as developed by my colleague Professor Lawrence Wilde).

Abstract:

Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1972 that there is ‘no radical social change without a radical change of the individual agents of change.’  Marcuse’s concern with the reifying experiences of the subject within advanced industrial capitalism – as well as the apparent political impotence or “embourgeoisment” of the working class at the time – inspired his libertarian application of the ‘tabooed insights of psychoanalysis’ to a reconstitution of Marxist solidarity. Art, in particular, offered for Marcuse the possibility of liberation from the oppressive one-dimensional ‘society of total mobilization.’

This paper will explore some of the conceptual tools Marcuse developed for exploring the question of solidarity as articulated in politically “committed” aesthetic representation – phantasy, the “aesthetic dimension,” Art’s “Great Refusal,” its “protest against that which is” – with reference to Doris Lessing’s “inner-space” fiction of the 1960s/70s. Like Marcuse, Lessing viewed a psychoanalytic focus on the alienated individual subject as the most important first step to critiquing capitalist relations and constructing a humanist vision of non-alienated social life. Lessing’s experimentation with the themes of madness, the subconscious, surrealism as emotional “truth,” and the compartmentalization of social roles within the individual subject – the “Great Refusal” of her female protagonists who reject the mechanisms of social conformity – thus reveals the reconciliation of the subject with its own fragmented nature as the foundation for any meaningful collective solidarity.

Thumbnail image by OpenDemocracy under a CC BY-SA license.