Critical Inquiry
Winter 1995
Volume 21, Number 2
Excerpt from "Christopher Caudwell" by E.P. Thompson:
"Caudwell was an anatomist of ideology. He was obsessed with the
characteristic illusions of the bourgeois epoch, with the logic of
these illusions (their epistemological expression and their
epistemological consequences), and with the way in which, possessed by
these illusions, we 'stand in our own light'. Caudwell¼s insights
were not only copious; they were connected by unitary
preoccupations. These preoccupations carry him quite far into
significant questions in cultural anthropology, linguistics,
psychology, philosophy, and also, possibly, in physics and
neurology. Insofar as certain of these same ideological illusions had
penetrated deeply into orthodox Marxism also, so that what went by the
name of Marxism was standing in its own light, Caudwell was
potentially a heretic within the orthodox Marxist tradition. He may or
may not have known this ; we should at least note that his dismissal
of conventional Marxist reflection theory was blunt, even brutal, and
suggests a conscious polemic. His heretic potential was, anyway,
sensed subsequently by the orthodox and by fellow heretics alike; this
alone can explain the sudden blossoming, at the zenith of ideological
Stalinism, of the 'Caudwell Controversy', like a crimson cactus flower
in the sand hills of the Modern Quarterly. For that argument
was, at root, a displaced and ill-conducted argument between dogmatic
and creative Marxism, for which the structures of the Communist Party
offered no other outlet. And, finally, it will be argued,
Caudwell's heresy, or his creative impulse, is not exhausted
yet..."
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