> >no, you were read as assuming that a theory of social change is possible
>>as more than a retrospective account, as history; ie., that it is possible
>>to have a theory of the transition from capitalism to communism (or
something
> >other, or better, or other than capitalism) and not simply a theory of why
> >and how past events and processes of social change occurred. that would
>>be a fairly reasonable interpretation I think.
>
>
> one of the problems here was that i was speaking specifically to ken.
this might be how you see it now, but you kept saying i hadn't answered your question and accusing me of putting words in your mouth when i did. i answered _three times_ !
> otherwise, social change happens all the time, right? how did feminism
> come about? if families have changed, why? what about the green movement?
> or home schooling? in the US, how have anti-racist struggles come about?
> etc. and you just gave an account to wojtek about the family wage.
> awesome. i wasn't talking simply about capitalism--communism at all.
and this was not a theory of social change but an account of the history of forms of class composition. this is the difference: there is no key, dialectical or otherwise, which could be transplanted from one historical moment to that in the future as a _theory_ of social change. if you want answers to the specific questions about feminism, the greens, and anti-racist struggles, you would have to do the work, especially the work on the specific movements, the moment of capitalism. you can ask questions which try and relate the forms of subjectivity, the labour process, the tribulations of capitalist effectiveness and lines of crisis, the mode of extracting surplus value, whatever. but asking a set of questions only assumes that these are related, not that they manifested themselves in the same configuration or form at different moments, or indeed can be used as a key to unlock the mystery of how we do it again.
> as for the theory you offered, i was wondering if you thought it worthwhile
> to try to show how an account of the subject is compatible with marxism.
> you know, as some freudian feminists tried to do and as the freudo-marxists
> tried to do. yep, i realize that you might not think this is worthwhile.
> just wondering. i don't think it's an unreasonable question as it does get
> asked all the time and has been asked here in other ways, say w/ regard to
> butler.
i already tried to answer exactly this question in a previous post. here it is again, which i considered to be a question of class composition. think the class composition stuff of the heterodox italian marxists, plus althusser, plus lacan, plus probably another set of things tossed in.
... the contributions, for me, of a posthumanist marxism are:
a) that the term 'the subject of revolution' is rendered instead as the ways in which revolutionary subjectivity is formed and decomposed through struggle (and not prior to it, or 'underneath' as some essence); [hence why i replied to wojtek's post in terms of the forms of subjectivity provided by particular moments which are later figured in capitalist 'development' as obstacles to be overcome.]
b) that, contrary to commonplace readings of posthumanism (by humanists), there is no 'eradication of subjectivity' but rather an attempt to locate its complex set of historical premises and results;
c) that, at the level of organisational forms, it leaves this question open to the needs of the struggle, where those needs are defined as including objectives and programmes, but also simultaneously, the need to form and enhance anti-capitalist subjects/identities and organisations;
d) it remembers that marxism and communism are committed to the abolition of the working class as a class, hence are an 'anti-identity' politics, not the promise of a fulfillment of an ostensibly true working class identity;
and, here I would reach for marxists such as Tronti and Bologna, since the question of the relation between identity in Balibar and Zizek finds (for me) a good corollary, d) it does not make the party the repository of accomplished socialist or communist consciousness, since the party itself, or rather the appropriate organisational forms, can only ever be a consequence of the state of the class struggle, of the forms of class composition. (ie., there is a class consciousness amongst the US working class, but it is a consciousness of being the _US_ working class, which surely must produce a pretty strange configuration and sense of 'exceptionalism'...) moreover, the organisation's object is always not simply this or that issue, but more centrally, the forms of subjectivity, whose horizon must be left open. this refusal of closure -- and I will even abandon a certain kind of dialectical metaphysics in favour of this (for me) central issue -- is the most important innovation of posthumanism, which is really after all a re-assertion of Marx's anti-utopianism...
thirdly, on Chaz's point about Lenin, I think maybe this is a little too mystical: a) because the Russian revolution, the soviets, etc were not a result of Lenin's decisions or theory (he and the bolshies arrive on the scene after both are in full swing) and b), because this personification of the Russian revolution in the body of Lenin, is a story written after the event. this doesn't mean that Lenin should not be given his immense due, but there are other ways of writing and thinking of him that are less mystical. moreover, and here I'm interested in Badiou's concept of the truth-event, where an event (such as the Russian revolution) re-situates a whole body of ideas into the realm of widely-regarded, self-evident truth. that to me, would be one way of thinking about the relation between theoretical practice and 'changing the world', that the former cannot, but an event certainly can transform instances of the former into truths. such a perspective might enable us to avoid the mystique of the intellect as the vanguard of events which can shift the balance of the world and change it. that mystique of leadership is one of the obstacles I think.
but then, I think that Lenin, in the theory of the party, did explicitly seek to rewrite the reality of that event as the consequence of the party and theory. taken out of its context, leninism simply reduces into a dogmatic laziness (as if the question of organisational form has already been answered) and substitutes the question of class composition into the issue of recruitment (as if the line between membership and non-membership of the party is the same as the achievement of 'true working class consciousness'). -----
this is the first part of the post, answered last, becuase i thought it might be more useful to go to the social change stuff first.
> it was argued several times that balibar is a useful framework for
> understanding racism and what i've called 'classism.' the argument was
> that other approaches to racism are culturally essentialist and that
> classism is a subjectivist formulation. okay. but perhaps it is possible
> that one doesn't need to use balibar etc to provide a structural account
> of classism. that claim should be respected, heard on its own merits, and
> argued with. and v/v.
as i recall, the disagreement i had with calling it classism was not that this was culturally essentialist, but that it was pluralist (such that class, race and gender were figured as identities which could be separated) and that it disconnected the historical relationship between class and racialisation (which i guess you could call subjectivist), and the citation from balibar added gender and nationalism. no doubt there are others, who talk of the same processes: anyone who's done stuff on the historical emergence of the idea of 'the dangerous classes', even e.p thompson who gives me the real shits on many occassions has a lot of really interesting stuff on this -- and you can't get any more distance theoretically than that between thompson and balibar, even though thompson can be useful if (as i do) try not to take his narrative too seriously.
> 1. do you think we can do social research at all if social researchers
> generally have more power than those they study? if you do, how should
> that project proceed?
no, insofar as social researchers have institutional authority and disciplinary preoccuaptions, the research is going to be tainted by that. does that mean you shouldn't do it? not at all. even the rand corporation can make for useful and important reading, if only to know what the rand corp and their ilk are thinking.
> 2. suggestions that social researchers shouldn't do research on those who
> have less power than them can and are being used as a form of
> essentializing identity politics in the academy. how do you rescue your
> criticisms of sennett from complicity with this sort of politics,
> particularly if you do agree that other researchers can do justice to the
> project that sennett tried to undertake?
that wasn't my argument. his politics are my concern not his identity. it is his politics which leaves unanswered the question of the relationship between sociology as a discipline and his treatment of those he studies as objects for sociology. if he was doing a statstical study of these same people, it wouldn't be so bad. but his techniques allow him, or presume an intimacy, which directly raises for him and us the question of his role as a part of (to put it in the quaintest of terms) state and ideological apparatus.
> 3. you maintained that we should 'research up' and study capital and
> capitalists, is that the only set of power relations that are operative?
> [gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity]
i always thought these were part of a whole complex. and i asked the question of why should we be studying 'distinct' sets of people in the first place, especially if one is in the predicament of being part of an institution or discipline which makes the lines of responsibility difficult to get around. if you want to study racism why is there a need to sit (say) black people down in a room an get intimate details of their fears and concerns? and it makes little difference to me whether the researcher is black -- they too could be a part of the problem. why not study prisons, the law, the application of those laws, incomes and the labour market and labour process, the crap the media pumps out.... ? my one and only personal encounter with ethnographic methods (and it is surely a bad one but exemplifies all the implicit problems) was a class in which we were supposed to study 'neigbourhoods'. a thing which i never understood and neither did anyone else in the class, mostly because there is no neighbourhood here let alone one in which conflict is a major issue in, and that this is an import from the chicago school urban boys. but we had to do it, somehow. the lecturer encouraged people to study the neigbourhood watch groups that had been a part of a community policing regime of the last decade, with much of the funding drawn from insurance companies. but that's not what they were encouraged to study, and because of the ethnographic method's insistence on studying people, they had to confine themselves to studying the range of really quite lonely folks who would attend these meetings and copare them to the ones in the 'neighbourhood' who didn't. now, why would that be, and i'm sure you can guess the answer: the implicit question was to see how more people could be encouraged to attend. and who would be interested in this question: the cops and the insurance companies.
that is, we were being trained as spies. that sounds dramatic, but that's exactly what it was.
the students, pretty conservative students, with some constant provocations from me i should add, got variously pissed off and confused and insisted on studying the insurance companies and the history of the community policing scheme instead. they were told they weren't allowed; and they all rightly felt that they had no chance of understanding what the hell was going on if they couldn't. then they were told they could, after we threatened to go on strike, only to find that (gee wiz) neither the cops nor the insurance companies would co-operate at all. they, unlike the people from the 'neighbourhood', which was a very poor suburb, regarded the student-researchers as potential spies, which is of course all true. the lecturer then went on a much-celebrated sabbatical mid-way through the course, and we got another lecturer who let us do whatever topic we liked in whatever way we liked, which i'd already been doing in any event.
that, in short, is my model of what kind of research not to do, but it is how to misbehave in class. i shouldn't tell your students this, right?
Angela _________