Carrol
Jameson via Althusser, as Justin pointed out.
<URL: http://people.uleth.ca/~beaulieu/terms25101.html >
DETERMINATION IN THE LAST INSTANCE
Louis Althusser "Determination in the last instance operates through the
Structure in dominance"; although the economic is always ultimately
determinant, it may NOT be dominant at a particular point in history. "
>From Barbara Epstein <URL: http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue24/epstei24.htm
>
> ...Especially important for subsequent radical thinkers was the work of
> Louis Althusser, who sought to create a Marxist structuralism which
> recognized the decisive role of economic forces yet did not ignore the
> role of non- economic structures. "Vulgar Marxism" stressed the
> determination of the superstructure by the base. Humanist Marxism, if not
> ignoring economic reality entirely, emphasized the freedom of the human
> subject. Althusser's"anti-humanist" Marxism presented a concept of
> overdetermination: individuals were determined of intersecting
> structures, not all of them economic. Althusserinsisted, though, that
> economic forces were determinative "in the last instance" (leading many
> to ask how we would know when we had arrived at "the last instance").
> Social phenomena were not manifestations of a single "essence" (whether
> that be human freedom, for the Sartreans, or economic infrastructure, for
> orthodox Marxists). The search for such an essence was, at best,
> irrelevant to political struggles; at worst, the structuralist Marxists
> thought, essentialism was the lastrefuge of ideology.
Poststructuralists have continued along the route mapped by structuralist
anti- humanism -- and they have pushed the concept of overdetermination
even further than Althusserdid, until they arrive at an anti-
foundationalism that rejects the possibility of basic causes.
Althusserbelieved that some causes had more weight than others; he, at
least, regarded economic forces as decisive "in the last instance,"
whatever that might mean. The rigorous anti- essentialism of
poststructuralism -- including the Marxist variety -- argues that all
causes are equal, that no social force can be assigned a greater weight
than any other. This current of thinking has converged with - - and sometimes
explicitly drawn upon -- Nietzsche's view of the will to power as the ground of human relations, his suspicion of rationality, and his rejection of universal knowledge and of the rational subject FOR INTELLECTUALS IN THE UNITED STATES, THIS GENERAL THEORETICAL TREND crystallized with the publication of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics(1985) 1and the founding, in 1988, of the journal Rethinking Marxism. Laclau and Mouffe argue that Marx's view of the working class as the bearer of socialism introduced an essentialism that distorted the Marxist perspective generally, creating the basis for Leninist and Stalinist authoritarianism. They argue that political identities and positions must be understood, not as the product of economic forces, but as the discursive effects of political practices and conflicts. For Laclau and Mouffe, radical democratic politics must draw from, yet profoundly revise, Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony. They regard him as a precursor of anti- essentialism -- though one not, unfortunately, quite free of essentialist conceptions. In particular, there is the problem that, for Gramsci, the working class must play a central role in the construction of a socialist or left hegemonic project. Laclau and Mouffe's theoretical work severs the Marxist link between class and economic forces (essentialist notions, in their view), and culture and politics (sites of discourse, of the open and unfixed, the terrain of construction rather than constraint or determinacy) . If Hegemony and Socialist Strategyoffered the manifesto for the intellectual mini-movement that has formed around Marxist poststructuralism, the major institutional expression of this movement has been the journal Rethinking Marxism, (RM) which over the past decades has sponsored a series of national conferences. Not every paper in Rethinking Marxism(or presented at its conferences) has been directed at a synthesis of Marxism and poststructuralism; yet RMremains the major site for the development of this perspective. Political economy has been the main concern of the RMproject, followed by politics. The effect, whatever the region of the interventions, has been to define anti-essentialist perspectives as necessary for left or radical politics. Radicalism thus becomes identified with re-interpretation or skepticism; radical politics is equated with cultural politics.
-- Michael Pugliese
I got an axe-handle pistol with a graveyard frame. It shoots tombstone bullets wearing balls and chains. I'm drinking TNT. I'm smokin' dynamite. I hope some screwball start's a fight, 'cause I'm ready, ready, ready
Muddy Waters, "I'm Ready."