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But then limitations of this kind are organically related to the strengths of this alternative tradition. The habitual and as it were inevitable relation of structure to doctrine, or the application of formal categories, is a characteristic of the developed philosophical position which in most other respects is a source of real strength. That is why it is so important, now, to go beyond the kind of argument which developed in English in the 1930s, for while particular refutations of this or that reading, this or that method, have an immediate significance, in our whole situation they can hide the fact that behind our local English practicalities is a set of unexamined general ideas, which then suddenly materialize on quite another plane as a sort of social theory: from the critical minority to minority culture and minority education; or from the richness of past literature to a use of the past against the present, as if the past, and never the future, the sense of a future, were the only source of values. The local victory of the thirties was bought at a price we have all since paid: the most active relations between literary and social studies, and the most fundamental and continuing relations between literature and real societies, including present society, have in effect been pushed away from attention, because in theory and in practice any critical examination of them would disturb, often radically, our existing social relations and the division of interests and specialisms which both expresses and protects them.

I want to end by emphasizing two concepts used by Goldmann, which we ought to try to clarify, theoretically, and which we ought to be trying, collaboratively, to test in practice. The first is the idea of the ‘collective subject’: obviously a difficult idea, but one of great potential importance. Literary studies in fact use a related idea again and again. We not only refer, confidently, to ‘the Jacobean dramatists’ ‘the Romantic poets’ and ‘the early Victorian novelists’, but also we often use these descriptions in a quite singular sense, to indicate a way of looking at the world, a literary method, a particular use of language, and so on. In practice we are often concerned with breaking down these generalizations, and that is right: to know the difference between Jonson and Webster, or Blake and Coleridge, or Dickens and Emily Brontë, is in that real sense necessary. Yet beyond this we do come to see certain real communities, when we have taken all the individual differences into account. To see only the differences between Blake and Coleridge, but not also the differences between a Romantic poem and a Jacobean play and an early Victorian novel, is to be quite wilfully limited and indeed quite unpractical. And then to be able to give an account of this precise community, a community of form which is also a specific general way of seeing other people and nature, is to approach the problem of social groups in a quite new way. For it is no longer the reduction of individuals to a group, by some process of averaging; it is a way of seeing a group in and through individual differences: that specificity of individuals, and of their individual creations, which does not deny but is the necessary way of affirming their real social identities, in language, in conventions, in certain characteristic situations, experiences, interpretations, ideas. Indeed the importance for social studies may well be this: that we can find ways of describing significant groups which include, in a fundamental way, those personal realities which will otherwise be relegated to a quite separate area. To have a sociology concerned only with abstract groups, and a literary criticism concerned only with separated individuals and works, is more than a division of labour; it is a way of avoiding the reality of the interpenetration, in a final sense the unity, of the most individual and the most social forms of actual life.

The problem is always one of method, and this is where the second idea, of the structures of the genesis of consciousness, must be taken seriously. We are weakest, in social studies, in just this area: in what is called the sociology of knowledge but is always much more than that, for it is not only knowledge we are concerned with but all the active processes of learning, imagination, creation, performance. And there is very rich material, within a discipline we already have, for the detailed description of just these processes, in so many individual works. To find ways of extending this, not simply to a background of social history or of the history of ideas, but to other active processes through which social groups form and define themselves, will be very difficult but is now centrally necessary. For relating literary process to the social product, or the social process to the literary product—which is what now we mostly do—in the end breaks down, and people retire, with that by now professional expression of resigned intelligence and virtue, to the teaching of the day before yesterday. But if in every case we try, by varying forms of analysis, to go beyond the particular and isolated product—‘the text’—to its real process —its most active and specific formation—I believe we can find points of connection that answer, as our separated studies so often do not, to our closest sense of our own living process.

On each of these points—the idea of the collective subject, and the idea of the structures of the genesis of consciousness—Lucien Goldmann’s contribution, though unfinished, was significant. Locked as he was in much immediate controversy, he seems often to have been limited to restating his most general positions; yet even here, in ways that in summary I have not been able to indicate, he produced refinements and further definitions, in so complex a field, from which we can all learn. We can dissent, as I often do, from particular formulations and applications, and still recognize the emphasis, the exceptionally valuable emphasis, which he gave, theoretically and practically, to the development of literary and social studies.

And this is more than a professional concern. Beyond the arguments, as listening to him last spring in Cambridge it was not difficult to see, there is a social crisis, a human crisis, in which, in just these ways, we are ourselves involved. For the achievement of clarity and significance, in these most human studies, is directly connected with the struggle for human means and ends in a world that will permit no reserved areas, no safe subjects, no neutral activities. Now and here, in respecting his memory, I take the sense he gave: of a continuing inquiry, a continuing argument, a continuing concern; of a man who made, in our time, a significant response, and with whom we can find, as I think he would have said, a significant community, a way of seeing and being and acting in the world.