> Doubtless there are changes in the mode of production, but not yet, as
> far as I can see a change in the mode of production. These ought to be
> isolated.
Agreed.
> But pomo does not do that.
>It takes surface appearances for ontological categories and declares,
>abstractly, an end to all grand narratives.
Some do, some don't. Not all those associated with pomo by listers talk in terms of grand narratives and the ends of such. Rorty talks about grand narratives, Lyotard too. Here's Derrida on the topic: "I do not consider myself either a postructuralist or a postmodernist. I have often explained why I almost never use these words, except to say that they are inadequate to what I am trying to do. I have never spoken of 'the announcements of the end of all metanarratives', let alone endorsed them." And: "I am, in fact, not at all, truly not at all in agreement with Rorty, especially where he takes his inspiration from my work."
But here's a bit that speaks more directly to the issue above: "...no serious Marxist can shrug his shoulders over, say, abstraction, as if it were nothing to speak of. Nor, for that matter, over 'metaphysics' as an abstraction. ...That is something else I have learnt from Marx: namely, that we need to account for the possibility of the process of abstraction. Marx spent a lifetime analysing the possibility of abstraction in all spheres of existence. And he taught us, among other things, that we should not shrug off abstraction as if it were nothing to speak of ('that's just an abstraction')..." [from "Marx & Sons", in _Ghostly Demarcations_]
Moreover, I'm not at all sure that it's possible to separate essence and appearance along the lines of historical invariant and historical contingency, ie., to separate them out temporally -- if that's the sense in which you mean to invoke the charge of an ontologisation of appearance. (In any case, I'm not quite sure which writer you might have in mind here. I can't think of anyone who might fit the description.) Nor do I think the terms appearance and essence are useful if they're supposed to imply a hierarchy of importance, the dichotomy of ideality and materiality, nor a distinction as to more and less real.
> That is that the subjective factor in history has been
> decisively set back. I mean the working class was beaten, and
> internalised its beating as despair, and further that the ruling class,
> having defined its own project for a century in terms of containing
> working class pressure, is also disoriented. These are real conditions
> that reproduce the ideas of 'the death of the Subject' and so on.
Some initial comments:
First, to ask the question of what changes to the labour process, the composition of labour, the composition of capital, etc mean about the subjective, lived, experience of the working class, including that of class strategies and possibilities.
This kind of analysis, which should be the strength of marxists, seems to be squandered in skirmishes with presumably competing cults for the hearts and minds of, well, undergrads -- those nasty pomos who lead our yoof astray. This kind of politics does not work unless one has recourse to a strict distinction between subjective and objective moments, wherein the former is seen as the beginning and end of what is at stake. So, it either becomes a matter of asserting that 'nothing has changed' in the mode of production and what remains is the 'subjective problem', often enough reduced down into a call for more recruits, more papers sold so as to be a parody of marxism, a cultish marxism, in which anything in the service of polemic is acceptable. Or, it becomes a matter of claiming that yes, the mode of production has changed but, given the strict delineation between subjective and objective, this does not for all that mean anything for the models of political organisation, etc that have been bequeathed to us.
Second, I agree with you, if by the above you mean to suggest the collapse
of a certain post-war settlement. But I wouldn't confine it to the terms of "the subjective factor in history has been decisively set back", since this already begs the question of whether this was i) a particular version of subjective action (political organisation, representation, class composition); and ii) a particular sense of history (linear progress, the steady accumulation of reforms). That is, would we assume the nostalgic project of returning to such, or are there emergent forms of political action, organisation, class composition and indeed senses of historicity that might be better regarded as 'timely'?
I think I've a sense of LM's analysis of these changes, that might include terms like 'atomisation', and hence the need to re-assert a historical subject; but is this subject and this historicity unchanged by whatever those changes to the mode of production you might iterate? And, is the terrain of this struggle divided into subjective and objective moments, where the former is regarded as pre-eminent?
> there is no more reason to think those ideas an adequate expression of
> the trends the mirror, than, for example, a fundamentalist Marxism that
> insists nothing has ever changed.
I never suggested that 'they' were adequate, which would in any event presuppose some kind of homogeneity amongst those we're referring to (rather obliquely) here. There is good reason to suppose that, to take another example, even conservative liberal tracts like Fukuyama's end of history book says something, perhaps despite itself, that is worth considering seriously, and more seriously than can be accomplished by declaring it in error, period. In any case, is theory ever adequate to what it seeks to, purports to, grasp?
Angela