> >>I wouldn't repudiate anything I wrote in the passage. I'd express it
> >>a bit differently, for sure, but I'm not rejecting it. In fact, I
> >>think it hints at what Angela was calling for, a material analysis of
> >>where "postmodernism" came from. I'm with Jameson when he argues that
> >>one can't really be for or against "postmodernism" - it's everywhere,
> >>the cultural logic of what's optimistically called "late capitalism."
catherine wrote:
> >I don't like this use of 'postmodernism', why not say 'late
>> capitalism' -- why confuse it and/or bind it so inextricably to
postmodernism as a
> > cross-media generic description, except to produce a new version of the
>> old base-superstructure thing.
'late capitalism' has its own set of problems, but i tend to prefer it myself. it's a little more wieldy than 'the real subsumption of labour by capital' which is the more fruitful concept i think.
but on the base/superstructure thingy itself: the collapse of the self-evidence of this would be a marker of that 'post' in many ways. marx hardly presents that distinction between relations of production and the social relations of (re)production in the stark terms that some later marxists did and indeed, the concepts of 'real and formal subsumption' (from _capital v1_) refer to the transformation of the relationship between form and contents as a transitional moment within capitalism itself that included changes within the labour process, patterns of ownership as well as in the relation between cultural practices and the emergence of the culture industry, science as an adjunct and science as a branch of production, etc -- ie., it should not have been registered as a distinction between 'production' and 'culture' conceived in rather crude cartesian terms as a difference between matter and mind.
if the distinction between base and superstructure emerged as the key debating point at a certain conjuncture, it was probably around the same time that this was unravelling: eg. in order for base/superstructure to make much sense in this debate, there had to be posited a distinction between production and reproduction in a way that paralleled the distinction between (say) economics and culture as the neokantian university understands those latter categories, and where the relation between the two had to be established as one of causation or explanatory dominance of one 'sphere' over the other, or in terms of a distinction echoing mind and body (descartes). i'm assuming (hoping) that in fact marxists don't presume that both the separation and particular way of relating culture and production specific to the neokantians is not regarded as transhistorical; but rather as a moment of capitalist history. i'm also assuming (and hoping) that marxists don't think of the base/superstructure distinction as paralleling any kind of objective/subjective distinction where such a distinction relates to truth/ideology. but marx being read through (and as) neokantianism seems to be all the rage.
which is another way of saying that whilst the distinction between base and superstructure may have been socially valid for a particular time, it isn't now. the epistemological 'debates' on this list have (contrary to the advertising) been about re-asserting the primacy of the 'superstructural' (knowledge, science) as if this is distinguishable from 'base' and in fact has both transcendental and causal power. in short, the attempt to salvage some kind of transcendental realism or autonomous 'science' has been about re-asserting the presumed agency (and autonomy) of intellectuals at a time when the vast majority of intellectuals' are little more than slightly (but by no means always) better-paid proletarians.
doug's remarks on the relationship between capital as subject (as well as the explanatory priveliging of consumption and the realm of exchange and consumption over production) and the emergence of postmodernism are i think heading in a more interesting direction. they also bring to mind that when it comes to defining the specificity of capitalism, many so-called marxists think of it in terms of 'the market' and money, so the question would then be not 'why do postmodernists think of money as subject?', by 'why would anyone?', or more specifically, 'why would this be the case now?'.
i'd say it has much more to do with
a) the decomposition of prior forms of working class subjectivity (the keynsian recognition of the working class in the schema of 'effective demand', the collapse of the USSR, the collapse of trade unions and tripartism, the erosion of the conditions of social democracy, etc; which was, in another sense and perhaps more importantly,
b) a decomposition wrought by the displacement of labour by machines and mass unemployment as capital attempted to flee its presupposition in labour-power (which, looked at like this, is an index not of the powerlessness of the working class but our power, though a very partial or containable one able to be picked off for various complex reasons); and
c) this means that the 1980s should be seen as the years when capital indeed tried to put a distance between itself and organised labour-power, to assume an autonomy within the circuit of its own reproduction in order to simultaneously re-assert its primacy as a destructive power able to decompose those remaining forms of organisation. hence, the terrorism of money in the late 20th c and why it's hardly capable of stability.
diminished expectations? quite likely. that's what makes for the differences between the _german ideology_ and _capital_ -- an exploration of the force of the objectifications of capital, the relation between the forms of subjectivity and submission after the experience of the defeat of the Paris Commune.
we can't quite make fetishism (as in the chapter on the fetishism of commodities) mean brainwashing or epistemological error, since it's hardly a state of mind.
thanks for the excerpts from _wall street_. they're a distinct breath of fresh air after the babble about epistemology and truth.
Angela _________