The coming Glorious Revolution

Joshua Howard joshuahoward24 at hotmail.com
Tue Apr 3 16:29:24 PDT 2001


Brad wrote:
>Actually, Derrida represents the terminal "parasitic" decay
>phase of this "counterrevolution" in public discourse. At the same time,
>is was a revolution in the (capitalist) means of intellectual production,
>generating the inevitable overproduction of intellectual objects, some
>useful, others useless or even harmful, in the service (largely) of
>academic industry. Desperate to keep up with the ever widening torrent of
>these objects, the intellectual participants in this process have often
>lost sight of the difference between the _production_ and _presentation_ of
>intellectual material - a simple notion famously expounded upon in the
>introduction to the Grundrisse. I'm sure this distinction has been
>observed by many others as well throughout history.

I agreee with most of what you have written in this thread as well as the end of this paragraph but have to take exception to this statement. Are you at all familiar with Derrida's work or are you just speaking here of "Derrida", of "post-structuralism" and what it means in this country? How can you claim he is part of capitalist overproduction. Poststructuralism seems to be the easy target on this list even though the word and concept don't even exist in France. I am neither claiming that he's my favorite philosopher nor always used for good, but a Marxism that doesn't take into account Derrida (or Adorno, if you like, since his project was similar) and other late twentieth century thinkers is bound to be limited in its critique and a failure in its practice. If "parasitic" and "counter-revolutionary", you actually mean the cottage industry that has sprung up in academic departments that have some nebulous cultural studies outlook, then I am tempted to agree with you since it is possible to link them to the fragmentation of the left, the celebration of this fragmentation and possibly obscurantism for its own sake. But these are not the same. Even then I can't reduce intellectual or cultural production so easily to economic models the way you do here particularly since they are not the cause of apathy.

Which passage in the _Grundrisse_ Introduction are you speaking of here? _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com



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