Spivak & Eagleton

Daniel F. Vukovich vukovich at uiuc.edu
Wed Jan 26 18:52:25 PST 2000


Angela wrote:

Rakesh wrote:

> Yoshie, I don't understand the point Spivak, Eagleton or you are making

> in the excerpt and comment below.

That's because it makes no sense without Yoshie's opening line which read: "Unlike Daniel and nearly all other postal scholars, Spivak took one strand of Eagleton's criticism of postmodernism rather seriously...".

Outed again! But hear me out: while I think it is fine that this list has its own psycho-cyber-stalinist in Furuhi, it is just not right that we Postal Employees get treated like this. I realize we came off bad vis a vis the UPS strike, that the mob is still in our union, and that, yes, sometimes your mail comes late, or damaged, or not at all. But *you* try to keep all that paper straight, *and* spend the day refuting the existence of reality, *and* denying 'revolutionary knowledges' to the masses. I didn't know Spivy was a co-worker, but am happy to hear it. In fact it is just one big Union over here: virtually everyone who is not an anglo-american positivist of one type or another belongs. We got the corner on Continental philosophy too, of course. There is a bearded fellow with a smirk on his face, and its not Zizek.

PS to YF: I do believe you are supposed to put a hyphen in there: post-al, critique-al, etc etc. How else will you work your way up to Syracuse Uni?

> but the insistence that THEORY is not capable of transcending

>the conditions in which it finds itself should be par for the course for a

>materialist conception of the possibilities and impossibilities of

>theoretical practice.

Absolutely. Its why Marx could always "go on thinking," as Stuart Hall puts it. And no doubt why he had to say "I am not a Marxist."

Angela also noted: To put it another way, either there is something to be said for historical materialism, and thereby also an historical and materialist account of historical materialism, or else there really is an indistinction between historical materialism and ideology, where histmat is only allowed to function as histmat where everything OTHER than histmat is concerned -- ie., a claim to the accomplishment of epistemic transcendence, idealism par excellence parading as its opposite.

Well said indeed. Balibar has a great, long essay ("The Vacillation of Ideology in Marx") in which he traces the genealogy of ideas of class and class struggle thru Marx (and Fred's) careers-- as these are affected by the class struggles of their times. The point is that the class struggle affects theories and practices of "class struggle." Thinking about that, beyond slogans about "the masses" and "objective interests," and beyond the stupidity of a "false consciousness" notion of ideology, is no small task.

--dfv

------------------------------------------------------ Daniel F. Vukovich Dept. of English; The Unit for Criticism University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 ------------------------------------------------------



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