Complex literary texts are overdetermined and resist reduction to one factor

Evidence

Literary texts are produced in highly differentiated, usually overdetermined contexts of competing ideological and cultural clusters, so that any particular text of any complexity will always have to be placed within the cluster that gives it its energy and form, before it is totalized into a universal category. This fact of overdetermination does not mean that individual texts merely float in the air, or that ‘Totality’ as such is an impossible cognitive category. But in any comprehension of Totality, one would always have to specify and historicize the determinations which constitute any given field; with sufficient knowledge of the field, it is normally possible to specify the principal ideological formations and narrative forms. What is not possible is to operate with the few texts that become available in the metropolitan languages and then to posit a complete singularization and transparency in the process of determinacy, so that all ideological complexity is reduced to a single ideological formation and all narrativiries are read as local expressions of a metatext. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 472

Categorization

• XREF: Overdetermination from Althusser offers the reader a structural model for how a strategic identity could be held without essentialist collapse — no single determination fixes the subject. — connects to: Literary form depends on the deep logic of its raw material — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 389; Postmodernist texts resist thematic meaning and are flawed when interpretation succeeds — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 243; Any complex text is multiply determined across ideological worlds, not just one — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 205 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Any complex text is multiply determined across ideological worlds, not just one #corroborates (0.93) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 205
• Literary form depends on the deep logic of its raw material #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 389
• Postmodernist texts resist thematic meaning and are flawed when interpretation succeeds #corroborates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 243