>Chas.: I will look into it. I think there is some possibility that the
phrase you are referring to may not have been meant to say something limiting
support for opening up immigration
no, that wasn't my impression either. but i did think it was couched in terms of further exploration rather than specifically taking on anti-immigration politics. ok, so there is a combined effort around affirmative action, but is there around anti-immigration?
>Chas. Do you know of Schumpeter's phrase about capitalism having creative
destruction as a key moment. That's why I said it the other way, to avoid the
identity with Schumpeter's term. Did the deconstructionists intend to render
an idea analogous to the economist Schumpeter's ? In Marxist terms,
periodically some constant capital has to be destroyed to reestablish or
raise the rate of profit.
the destruction of constant capital, of which we could cite war as an occasion of, is not analogous to deconstruction. but there is a sense it which deconstruction does situate itself as a theory of crisis, but not in this way. for instance, a deconstructionist (of which I am not, but I have a lot of time for it) would say that the crisis is constitutive, that disequilibrium is ever-present, that it is at the limit of a discourse (and esp what that discourse seeks to exclude) that the truth of that discourse can be found. so, it's not about the renovation of a discourse in a new form, or the innovation of capitalism. rather, it's about the exposure of what makes discourses hang together as seemingly coherent. it is very close to Adorno's negative dialectics. it began with a different trajectory, but it seems now - after a very important split between the neo-liberal (or US) versions and the European (more marxist) versions - to be remarkably similar to Adorno, thankfully without Adorno's anxieties over 'popular culture'.