Here is a passage I like from _Marxism and Deconstruction_ (and there aren't many more): "Despite his maverick status within the profession of psychoanalysis, Lacan has always struck me as being a clever fundamentalist, rather conservative, clearly antimarxist, roundly antifeminist, and theocratic....Lacan's rejection of historical and social etiologies...his heideggerian ontology (the famous 'future anterior' is nothing more than the existential project in grammatical form)...and his idealist hypostatizing of the 'Ohter'...as a metahistorical instance all would seem to program a conservative politics" (104).
In Chapter 3 "Deconstruction and Dialectics," Ryan uses Marcuse as a stepping stone first to Adorno and then to deconstruction: "Unlike the early Marcuse's neohegelian dialectics, Adorno's negative dialectics bear strong affinities to deconstruction....Adorno's readings of Heidegger and Kant in _Negative Dialectics_ can be characterized as protodeconstruction" (73-6). In a postmodern Whiggish historiography, earlier philosophers get evaluated on the basis of whether one can claim to find what 'prefigures' postmodern philosophy in their writings. Hence, the tone of retroactive self-congratulation in their 'history of ideas.' (Ryan does this with a wee bit more sense of modesty than Laclau & Mouffe.) For all their criticisms of 'progress,' their narratives often plot a story of progress, which necessarily culminates -- you guessed it -- in their own philosophical positions!
In Chapter 8 "Marxism after Deconstruction," Ryan uses a tactic similar to Angela's: to paint pictures of "anti-Marx Lenin" and "anti-Leninist Marx." Ryan's criticism is somewhat more tempered than Angela's, however: "If I point out how Lenin misreads Marx, it is with the recognition that his historical situation demanded it" (164).
Ryan goes on to argue (also in Chapter 8) that the "major point of articulation between marxism and deconstruction is in the analysis of capitalist crisis and its implications," focusing on "credit" (176). Ryan writes:
***** Derrida calls this [Hegel's dialectic] a "restrained economy," because it is defined as equivalence, the identification of difference, and exchange, the law of the return of the same. He calls "general" an economy or logic founded on a heterogeneous dialectic that breaks with the system of equivalence and exchange. Its principle is "expenditure without reserve," that is, without the return of the same which is the basis of equivalence and exchange....Beyond the logic of equivalence and exchange, then, is a logic more suitable to socialism that takes as its point of departure the principle of expenditure without reserve or exchange. The logic implicit in Marx's analysis of credit already points toward such a principle, in as much as it describes the emergence of a radical alterity or difference in capitalism that indicates a crisis for the law of exchange....[A deconstructionist might say] that credit constitutes a structure of "undecidability" or "radical alterity." It represents the necessary emergence of what is "outside" or radically other to capital on the "inside" of capitalism. In order to survive, capitalism must remain the same, be self-identical, continuous, absolutely adequate to itself [Yoshie: ???]. That is the metaphysical dream as concrete economic necessity....Credit allows capital to appear continuous, but only at the expense of making it even more discontinuous. And it is precisely the discontinuity of the crisis of overproduction which points toward socialism. That crisis shows plainly that scarcity, austerity, and the obligation to exchange labor for livelihood are all effects of the system of exchange which demands equivalence and forecloses expenditure without reserve. A system that can overproduce can satisfy all needs, but the necessity of value realization through exchange prevents that satisfaction, that socialist distribution, that unreserved expenditure from occurring.... (176-181) *****
I am happy that Ryan sees a possibility of and necessity for socialism to satisfy all needs in the crisis of overproduction, but he doesn't convince me that it is necessary to put a deconstructive gloss upon a good old crisis theory. Besides, he seems to misread the actually existing capitalism (as opposed to capitalist ideology) as a metaphysical logic of equivalence, which doens't help his endeavor of 'articulating' marxism and deconstruction.
In Chapter 9 "Postleninist Marxism -- Socialist Feminism and Autonomy," Ryan puts forward his brand of deconstructive marxism by drawing upon Sheila Rowbotham and Antonio Negri. (BTW, Negri went on to co-author with Felix Guattari a postmodern potboiler titled _Communists Like Us_ [1990].)
On the question of socialist planning, which he elaborates in Chapter 8, Ryan will no doubt be judged to be "not going far enough" by Angela:
***** Conscious socialist construction must rely on consciously conceived models or social plans, and it is at this point of conceptualization that a deconstructive outlook can be relevant....Once the centrality of the logos or cogito is deprivileged, the planning models based on the individual mind also lose validity. The planned society would not be conceived as an integrated system with a central nervous system, a homogeneous whole whose unity and self-identity excludes all diversity and difference, but rather as a social collectivity, a heterogenous aggregate. In the first instance, then, the determination of a plan model would be a collective, participatory undertaking, not the conception of a detached, central planning body whose theoretical knowledge of planning is used to establish a hierarchy of administrative, cognitive center and administered practical instrument, mental and manual laborer. That distinction is essential to the rationality being put in question.
A second logocentric operation, which follows from the hierarchical distinction between mental and manual, theoretical center and practical periphery, is the process of synoptic formal abstraction. This central operation of metaphysics permits the resolution of practical complexity into theoretical purity and clarity, the division of a differentially interrelated world system into determinate, isolated instances, the reduction of heterogenous multiplicities into exclusive unities. Such processes lie behind the isolation of the synoptic, abstract, and formal concepts of economic good -- increase in GNP, utility maximization, Pareto optimality -- as the sole telos of the entire social machinery. All qualitative questions are reduced out for the sake of an abstract quantity....
The obvious deconstructive counter to this practical idealism in the rationality of economistic planning would be to privilege substantive material needs and to situate the nonetheless necessary calculating operation of formal abstraction within the domain of that practical, historical concern. This principle is best reflected in the "Basic Human Needs" approach. [Yoshie: Here, Ryan refers to _Models, Planning and Basic Needs_, eds. Sam Cole and Henry Lucas (Oxford, 1979).] Such a principle replaces the now dominant model of the single abstract ratio based on exchange (input-output, cost-benefit) with a planning model based on multiple, diverse, differentially related targets, which resist subsumption under an idealist, teleological norm -- equilibrium, balanced return, steady growth, an abstractly conceived "development," and the like....
A socialist construction that took a lesson from deconstruction's critique of logocentric rationality would be dehierarchized only provisionally or functionally centralized; it would begin with participatory input, not with a centralizing, efficient map, which, from the outset, focuses the social system toward the satisfaction of criteria of proportionality and optimality. Work would take on a different character, defined not by efficiency or inefficiency, but by how well it leads to the satisfaction of social needs, and the process of work would be included as a factor in planning. The telos of social activity would be defined...by the material and practical interplay between productive activity...and social need. Formal models would serve a coordinating, not an administrative, function. (187-88; 191) *****
Laudable sentiments are expressed here, but Ryan doesn't discuss how to undo "a hierarchy of...mental and manual" labor. Ryan seems to underestimate the fact that any hierarchy must be undone in real practice, not through a deconstructive reading.
Lastly, I'm always struck by a consistent note of Orientalism in postmodernism. Ryan writes in Chapter 7 "Reason and Counterrevolution": "Deconstructive philosophy can add...[to Marxism] an insight into the way the social world is constructed by the principles of *Western rationality*. The domains of mental and manual labor, the academy and the factory, so seemingly separate, are obvious examples of technologically constructed institutions that with time have become increasingly 'rationalized,' that is, organized according to such principles of *Western reason* as segmentation, centralization, efficiency, and hierarchy" (emphasis mine, 149). It seems that the "West" is the transcendental signified that underwrites postmodernism, to put it deconstructively. (Place a smiley mark here.)
Yoshie