[lbo-talk] "Essence Must Appear" (was postscript on "trolling")

[Angelus Novus]

--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com>
wrote:

>So,
> although economy is
> the real site and politics is a theatre of shadows,
> the main fight is
> to be fought in politics and ideology"

Since their departure from the Krisis group, the
circle around Robert Kurz and Roswitha Scholz (and
their journal Exit!) have been broadening their
critique beyond the immediate concern of political
economy to encompass a critique of ideology and a
general theory of modernity.

One interesting part of this is their rejection of the
orthodox Histomat lesson of the history being a
history of class struggle, with the basal relationship
between classes determining the ideological
superstructure.  Instead, they are developing a theory
of a history of fetish relationships, with periods of
of history having a fetish that structures production
and mediates social relationships.  For modernity,
this would be the "value-separation" fetish
(Wertabspaltung), which separates spheres of existence
that previously formed an organic unity (such as
economy and politics in feudalism, or economy and
household) by constituting a structurally masculine
sphere of the value relationship and a structurally
feminine private sphere that subsumes activities which
by their very nature cannot be organized according to
the logic of value.

This, to me, is a very nice way of subverting the
mechanistic claim of economy's determining power "in
the last instance" by showing that it is only in
modern society that the economy is a separate sphere
from other activities.

I will translate some excerpts from Gerold Wallner's
article "Die Leute der Geschichte" when I have some
time.




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